"you don't need the sophisticated hardware, anyway."
It depends on what kind of map you are building for which use cases and how passive you want it to be. Sure, you can use an iPhone or Android device but its not very passive (requires starting up, etc.) and it will quickly overheat when it gets hot. We tried it, and most people gave up after a few weeks given the fact that its not passive.
For most commercial fleets there is real value in the services we provide, eg monitoring, accident detection, remote video retrieval in case of accident, ELD compliance, etc.
You should read the article about rewards/incentives as it talks about that.
To create a fresh and intelligent 3D map of the world, Hivemapper combines a new software approach to making maps, with a mapping network of commodity drones and dashcam to grow and update the map. The global 3D map we are building is scaling and updating four times faster, and at a fraction of the cost, of traditional mapping companies.
Hivemapper Flight View uses our mapping pipeline to transform any video into a 3D map of the world. This map combined with knowledge of where the drone was during each frame of the video allows us to seamlessly transition between the 3D map and high-resolution video.
We have mapped almost all of SF just from drone videos, and in the coming weeks will release it and post the really amazing parts of SF into the map gallery.
It depends on what kind of map you are building for which use cases and how passive you want it to be. Sure, you can use an iPhone or Android device but its not very passive (requires starting up, etc.) and it will quickly overheat when it gets hot. We tried it, and most people gave up after a few weeks given the fact that its not passive.
For most commercial fleets there is real value in the services we provide, eg monitoring, accident detection, remote video retrieval in case of accident, ELD compliance, etc.
You should read the article about rewards/incentives as it talks about that.