Impressed Flight IF800 Tomcat + Sentera 65R Evaluation

Adam has spent his profession exploring the pure and human world from above utilizing drones, satellites, and mapping instruments. His firm Crossbill Geospatial supplies knowledge and session on all issues geospatial. Join with him on Linkedin and at his web site.

I’ve flown lots of the enterprise drones in the marketplace to create maps and knowledge for distant sensing evaluation. When Impressed Flight reached out and supplied me a demo unit of their medium carry IF800 Tomcat to overview on behalf of The Drone Woman I cleared my schedule. I wished to find out if this technique meets the necessities of a high-output geospatial agency.

Impressed Flight Applied sciences is an American drone firm headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California. For U.S.-based drone pilots, that makes Impressed Flight all of the extra compelling given the latest FCC ban on future, foreign-made drones. Moreover, the IF800 meets NDAA and Blue UAS necessities, which is one other key promoting level.

The Impressed Flight IF800 Tomcat drone begins at about $30,000, not together with the payload.

Getting began flying the IF800 Tomcat 

In preparation to fly this platform, I took a 90-minute coaching from IF employees who made certain I had all the pieces I wanted to achieve success and had been very useful in answering all my questions. I additionally discovered the supplied guidelines had been complete and made certain I didn’t need to troubleshoot something with the intention to get off the bottom. 

The IF800 Tomcat is, by all accounts, an enormous platform. It arrives in a considerable case the place the platform sits the other way up, requiring the attachment of touchdown gear earlier than flight. For these used to the folding arms of a DJI M300, the IF800 ought to really feel acquainted. It options 4 sturdy rotors, built-in strobe lights for visibility, and an FPV digital camera for pilot orientation.

The quantity of area wanted for all this tools will come as no shock to field-going professionals, however is price mentioning as cargo area might have to be deliberate for. Proven listed below are the Sentera 65R, RTK module, platform/GCS case, touchdown pad, and battery case.

The Floor Management Station

The Floor Management Station (GCS) is equally substantial. It’s a massive, rugged unit operating a personalized wrapper of QGroundControl (QGC) mission planning software program. Whereas the scale and weight could be a shock at first, the big display screen dimension is welcome given the detailed consumer interface throughout flights.

The controller permits you to use both the inner battery or a replaceable exterior battery on the again, providing you with the choice for seamless hot-swapping. That is key for enterprise customers in guaranteeing the GCS by no means dies throughout a protracted day of back-to-back missions.

The platform experiences on two separate GPS models, which possible accounts for the spectacular geo-referencing accuracy noticed even when flying with out energetic RTK corrections. In my checks, I often had no less than 30 satellites for every GPS when flying. 

Associated learn: American drone maker launches NDAA compliant drone with 40-minute flight time

Batteries and flight time

The plane batteries are massive, heavy models that have to be powered on earlier than they’re clipped into the platform. They’re sizzling swappable, that means the plane can keep on throughout battery swaps. I discovered I persistently bought no less than half-hour of flight time (whereas touchdown at 30%) whereas flying within the 4,500ft elevation foothills of Utah throughout winter. Flying at totally different elevations, temperatures, and with different payloads will have an effect on flight instances. 

My payload: the Sentera 65R

The IF800 Tomcat pairs with a wide range of payloads, together with EO/IR, optical, and LiDAR sensors. I selected to fly it with the Sentera 65R due to the excessive decision knowledge it may well produce and to check the claims of it being a super mapping digital camera.

I used to be in a position to interview Matt Skelton who’s a Product Advertising and marketing Supervisor at John Deere, which owns Sentera, concerning the 65R. He defined that the digital camera is tuned particularly for vegetation and scientific accuracy and favors a scientific output. By minimizing the inner picture processing corresponding to digital sharpening and color-grading, Sentera ensures the information is a extra genuine illustration of the bottom which is essential for repeatable tutorial or industrial analysis.

The 65R is a 65 megapixel RGB (RGB stands for Pink-Inexperienced-Blue, that means it solely captures inside the seen spectrum) digital camera with an built-in 500gb stable state arduous drive that permits for a surprising 3 picture captures per second.

It’s mounted to the platform by using Freefly’s sensible dovetail design which permits for environment friendly and easy payload swaps.

I wouldn’t think about the Sentera 65R a jack-of-all-trades digital camera. It accomplishes surveying, mapping, and analytics features extraordinarily effectively, however in case you are seeking to carry out infrastructure inspections or shoot cinematic 4K video, I’d have a look at different choices. This sensor was purpose-built for photogrammetry and vegetation evaluation.

The 65R’s hidden jewel is the worldwide shutter. On this planet of high-resolution aerial mapping, the choice rolling shutters can introduce picture distortions that smash sub-centimeter accuracy and might confound photogrammetry software program. The 65R world shutter has no such points, permitting for quicker flight speeds with out sacrificing readability.

Drawbacks price contemplating

My main ache level? You may’t regulate the main focus, shutter velocity, ISO, or aperture of the pictures being taken. Whereas I personally desire to have management over these settings, in the long run I needed to belief the sensor to do its job.

Skelton later instructed me that you would be able to management digital camera settings earlier than flights through a related internet interface with the digital camera. With that, I concluded that I may tolerate the digital camera managing the picture seize settings independently, because it carried out remarkably effectively. Nonetheless, for customers searching for extra management, Skelton mentioned that an in-app adjustment characteristic is deliberate for the 2026 roadmap. 

And for what it’s price,  the outcomes had been arduous to argue with. I examined the 65R in high-contrast daylight and flat, cloudy situations. In each occasion, the auto-exposure was spot on and the digital camera switched parameters and tailored whilst lighting situations modified all through survey flights. All my photos had been sharp and effectively targeted with no enter from me. 

A cropped picture from a 65R picture taken at 80m AGL. Some horses chewing on grass whose blades you possibly can just about rely.

The 65R workflow

Maybe probably the most vital departure from a standard workflow is the 65R’s use of inner Strong State Drive (SSD) storage moderately than detachable SD playing cards. The digital camera captures knowledge so quickly (as much as 3 each second) that an SD card merely can’t sustain with the write speeds required for a 65MP sensor.

From a sure perspective this creates a slight dilemma within the discipline which requires considered one of two approaches:

• The “Fly All Day” Strategy: The digital camera has a half-terabyte of storage. You may fly all day (or all week) with out worrying about area, monitoring the storage degree through an icon within the GCS.
• The “QC as You Go” Strategy: For these of us who’ve needed to refly tasks as a result of now we have been burned by a corrupted card or a blurry lens previously, we wish to test knowledge between flights (like a painful expertise with a sizzling range, you solely have to study that lesson as soon as).

As a result of the media isn’t detachable, checking the information means plugging the complete drone (or the digital camera through an AC adapter) right into a laptop computer.

Whereas switch speeds are spectacular ( roughly 130 MB/s on Home windows and probably quicker on Mac), it’s nonetheless a course of that requires the drone to be grounded. To optimize effectivity, I counsel adopting an F1-style pit cease technique.

By designating a particular crew member to be prepared with a laptop computer and arduous drive the second the drone touches down, you possibly can facilitate real-time knowledge backups throughout battery swaps and flight plan uploads. This coordinated method permits a pilot and observer to keep up practically steady flight operations all through the day. For discipline backups, using high-quality USB-C cables is right; my testing confirmed that 8GB of information might be transferred in beneath two minutes.

Backing up knowledge isn’t so simple as copying knowledge off of an SD card. 

Whereas the tools is actually spectacular, I wish to remind people who the information being collected is the entire objective of those instruments. I processed the 65R knowledge utilizing Agisoft Metashape, and the outcomes had been clear and sharp.

Typically, drone lenses produce a “fish-bowl” distortion on the edges of a 3D mannequin, but in my checks the ensuing elevation mannequin and orthomosaics had no bowing. I’d attribute that to the worldwide shutter, low lens distortion and excessive GPS alignment between images. The purpose clouds and Digital Elevation Fashions (DEMs) had been extremely sharp as effectively. 

Listed below are the anticipated floor pattern distances you possibly can anticipate from totally different flying heights in keeping with the Sentera on-line calculator:  

I used to be in a position to replicate these resolutions in my check flights. As you possibly can see from the desk, the bottom decision flying beneath Half 107 you’re going to get from the 65R is a pixel representing a 1.4cm sq. on the bottom. That’s simply concerning the dimension of one of many keys on the keyboard in entrance of you. Not dangerous!

An instance of the excessive decision imagery from the 65R, with a Pilot-in-Command, and his two children ‘working’ as Visible Observers in a car parking zone

Even with out the RTK/PPK module absolutely engaged, the information lined up with real-world coordinates with stunning accuracy, possible because of the high-quality GPS redundancy on the IF800.

IF800: Who is that this drone for?

For mapping professionals who have to cowl massive acreage with high-resolution, scientifically correct knowledge, and who have to do it inside a safe, NDAA-compliant framework, this is among the high platforms and digital camera mixtures in the marketplace. The upcoming 2026 updates, which Matt Skelton promised will embody 12-bit RAW seize and built-in digital camera controls inside the GCS, will solely make this technique extra formidable.

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