The Massachusetts DOT – Aeronautics Division had developed the Drone Pilot Program with the mission to leverage drones to provide imagery, video and other artifacts to various departments throughout the Commonwealth. These artifacts could assist with various activities such as bridge inspections, culvert inspections and snow removal monitoring, among others. Triverus was engaged to help MassDOT establish a Data Lake solution, allowing for the Aeronautics team to easily store and classify imagery, while providing a usable interface for their team of pilots in the field.

MassDOT launched their Drone Program focusing on delivering value to the Commonwealth while flying missions and capturing imagery in a manner that emphasized safety and privacy. As the program gained momentum, they quickly outgrew their initial approach to store and catalog drone data and required a more robust solution that would support them into the future.

The Triverus team put in place an MVP Data Lake solution, integrating data from MassDOT’s flight management and planning system, creating a flexible storage mechanism based on that data and pushing results to an ArcGIS platform to provide easy access to mission imagery for customers of the Drone Program.

The Triverus team used an agile methodology to flush out the needs of the Drone Program team and built out a centralized repository that links drone data stored in DropBox with mission planning data stored in SalesForce.com. The solution publishes the resulting drone imagery to the Commonwealth’s ArcGIS platform. The team made use of various AWS components such as lambdas, SQS, SNS and RDS.