After 6 Years of Testing Wingtra Launches the WingtraOne Gen II, A Drone Made Just for Large-Scale City Mapping

Over the last several years Wingtra has made a name for itself as the go-to commercial drone for surveying and mapping.

But it’s not sitting still.

The Swiss-based startup just launched the WingtraOne Gen II, the next generation of its professional mapping drone.

Made for large-scale city mapping, the new drone has the potential not only to improve the way big projects are planned, but also to open up even more industrial use cases for 3D models.

The new drone comes with a new Sony camera made specifically for mapping buildings and is supported through partnerships with geospatial software giants Bentley Systems and Esri.

In short, Wingtra already had one of the best drone mapping solutions on the market—and now it’s released an even better one.

Specs and Details for the WingtraOne Gen II

Wondering what makes the WingtraOne Gen II special?

Here are the highlights:

• Oblique camera. The Oblique Sony a6100 supports highly detailed 3D reconstruction by collecting extra data for mapping tricky vertical walls (just think of all the walls you’ll find in a city and you’ll understand the value).
• PPK for high level of accuracy. The Gen II comes with a built-in multi-frequency L1/L2 PPK (Post Processed Kinematic ) GNSS receiver, providing centimeter-level accuracy for 3D modeling.
• Multispectral payloads. The Gen II can carry the RedEdge sensor and the Altum sensor from MicaSense. Both sensors support the capture of 5-band multispectral data and the Altum also supports thermal data collection.
• Predictive maintenance. Intelligent algorithms in the Gen II continuously analyze all critical flight components before and during the flight.
• Smart notifications. Automatic notifications from the above alert you to maintenance issues before they become critical.
• Remote ID ready. The Gen II comes with a WiFi module that ensures compliance with forthcoming Remote ID requirements in the U.S.
• Landing accuracy. A new navigation and heading unit (NHU) improves GNSS accuracy and boosts the landing accuracy of the Gen II to about six feet.

Of course, visual data collection is just the first step for creating great 3D models.

In addition to all these new features and improvements to help surveyors capture high quality data, Wingtra has formed key partnerships with Bentley Systems and Esri, both of which are huge players in geospatial software.

Through the partnership, users can process the visual data they collect with the Gen II in the cloud, leveraging Esri’s Site Scan for ArcGIS and Bentley’s ContextCapture to quickly create highly accurate 3D models.

Oblique Camera Data + High Quality Software = Step Change in 3D Modeling

One challenge surveyors face when constructing 3D models of buildings is that vertical walls require a high level of detail in order to be rendered accurately.

The Oblique Sony a6100 was created to solve this problem. It has a very wide angle field of view, from the front to the sides, and presents a powerful way to collect data for mapping cities.

An illustration of the Oblique Sony a6100’s wide angle view

To demonstrate the power of the WingtraOne Gen II and its oblique camera capabilities, Wingtra used it to create a detailed map of the city of Zurich.

The flight time needed to make the map was just six hours—a very short period given the scope of the project.

Read the case study to learn more about how Wingtra’s project in Zurich.

Big Focus on Reliability

While the PPK receiver, the new oblique camera, and the two big software partnerships Wingtra has made are all impressive, one of the biggest features the company offers in its new drone is something more simple: reliability.

Wingtra can make the claim to reliability because it has been around for over six years now, which means it’s had the chance to field test its hardware over and over.

With GEN II, we’re marking a key point in commercial drone evolution by providing you with a reliable workhorse that you can count on over every flight.

– Julian Surber, Product Manager at Wingtra

To make this concrete, Wingtra has shared these numbers highlighting the amount of work and testing that went into creating the WingtraOne Gen II:

• 100,000+ flights
• 6 years of testing and improvements
• 40+ software releases

And Wingtra is right to highlight all of this experience.

While some drone startups make claims about what they’ll be able to do one day, Wingtra has been in the field for years, helping professionals conduct surveys and create 3D maps.

Learn more about the WingtraOne Gen II in this video: