#30 – Jeff Fagerman

#30 – Jeff Fagerman

June 29th, 2026

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00:00:10,850 –> 00:00:31,780 [Stewart Walker]
Welcome to LIDAR Magazine and the LIDAR Magazine Podcast Series. My name is Stewart Walker, and I’m the managing editor of LIDAR Magazine. My guest today is Jeff Fagerman. He is the CEO of LiDAR USA. Jeff, we’re delighted to have you on board. It’s a great pleasure to be talking to you, and the magazine’s very grateful to you for finding the time for this podcast.

00:00:32,800 –> 00:00:37,620 [Jeff Fagerman]
Thank you, Stewart. It’s great to be here, and I love the magazine, and I love the industry.

00:00:37,620 –> 00:01:59,440 [Stewart Walker]
Yes, indeed. Well, let me give some quick background. I should start by saying, of course, that I spent a wonderful day at your offices in June 2019, seven years ago, and from that, I wrote a long article about your company that appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of the magazine. So that’s a long time ago, so we hope that any listeners who have read the article will forgive just a little bit of repetition today. So your company, LiDAR USA, is very well known. It’s a leading integrator of UAV lidar systems with a large product range, and you’ve given some of these products, uh, humorous names.

You’re a frequent exhibitor at trade shows like GeoWeek and Intergeo, and it’s kinda hard to talk to you there because you’re usually surrounded by a crowd of existing and prospective customers wanting to discuss their experiences and their aspirations. So let’s start by talking about you, and then we’ll talk about your company and the technology and, and, and so on. So, Jeff, please tell us a bit about your early life, and in particular how you became interested in matters geospatial. I know you’re a Ferris State and Purdue graduate. I know you worked at Intergraph in your early years spearheading the firm’s photogrammetry software, so if you can take it from there.

00:01:59,440 –> 00:03:17,280 [Jeff Fagerman]
Sure. So going back a little bit further, back to the childhood days, my dad set up, he worked for the county. He was the equalization director for a county in northern Michigan. And before there was things such as GIS and stuff, he set up the personal mapping stuff. And at that time, you know, he was responsible for having, I believe it was Abrams out of Lansing, Michigan, fly the county every so many years, five years or 10 years, whatever was required. And as a result of that, the old diapositives or the old prints would get thrown away for the county, but he didn’t throw them away. He brought them home for us kids, and we’d plaster them on our bedroom ceilings so we could see the entire county every night. You know, we had that for years, and that kind of led us into just liking mapping because we were looking at photography all the time of the entire county and where we lived. And we grew up on a farm, and we loved mathematics.

We liked working outdoors. I mean, that was me and all my siblings. So that kinda got us into go to Ferris. Three of us went through Ferris. Two of us went through Purdue, and then we spread out from there. And I worked at Intergraph for 14 years. I loved that job. It was very hard to leave it, but, leave it I did. Bought the system that I worked on there and went into production photogrammetry for a number of years and went from there and bought another little business to do medical billing and then from there back to lidar and photogrammetry, actually building the systems. And you know, was always trying to build a smaller system because the systems that were huge were expensive, over a million bucks, and there weren’t very many, and the software wasn’t that good. I mean, it was the early years. It was early 2000s, 2010, the whole timeframe there. You know, lidar, well, GPS was just coming into its being, and we kinda need GPS to do what we do even though earlier than that, people were doing lidar without GPS.

It was just much, much more difficult. And it’s interesting, now it’s kinda swung back around with SLAM. Now without using GPS, we’re using SLAM to restructure everything, but still, we want things in world coordinates, so GPS is absolutely essential to what we do, and we use it in everything we do every day in our life. But that brought us into building systems, and the reason we started building systems, because we were trying to figure out what can we do here in the States that can’t be shipped overseas to any other country? And it was the service work. That’s what we were originally intending to do, but we built our first system using a, a Velodyne 32 and a FARO Focus 3D. They both came out at the same time. And plagued with problems, and we finally got them to work, work together, and we decided, man, we really like building these systems.

And so we said, “Well, we’ll put the service work aside, and we’ll start manufacturing the hardware and the software to do mapping and, and bring it more to board scale.” I know the word now is democratize (it) but we were just trying to bring it more into the surveyor’s realm, and surveyors don’t move very fast in general accepting technology. You could see that looking back at GIS. You can see it looking at GPS. You know, even before that, back to EDMs and stuff, they’re reluctant to jump on the bandwagon. There’s always a few that are, but not the majority.

And now we see that most surveyors now, you know, have, like, a Mavic or some small, uh, drone for doing aerial UAV-type photogrammetry, which is great for recon and stuff. But still, majority of them don’t have a lidar system because it’s kind of pricey, but not really when you weigh out your labor cost and everything. But that brought us to where we are today, so now we, you know, manufacture UAVs, you know, mobile mapping systems and cameras and the whole gamut. We’ve done dozens of scanners and at least as many cameras and probably a dozen different INS sensors. From different manufacturers. And that brought us to where we’re at now, and the industry’s still growing, the competition’s growing. A lot more stuff from the Far East is coming in, you know, so it’s a, it’s an interesting time.

00:06:25,296 –> 00:06:31,816 [Stewart Walker]
Yes, indeed. Well, just a little bit of background for some listeners. We’ve mentioned Intergraph, a company in, in Huntsville, not very far from your location in Hartsell, Alabama. And, in case any readers aren’t quite sure, Intergraph was a, a CAD company founded in 1969. It eventually became part of Hexagon in 2010, and it’s now part of Hexagon that is in the process of being spun off into a new company called Octave. So that kind of connects together some of the, the threads. But I think one of the really interesting things to me about your, your, your company, LiDAR USA, it’s a family business. Your son, Daniel, you, you’ve mentioned him, joined you in 2010 to start the business. He’s the CTO. Your son-in-law, Forest Briggs, is the COO. Your wife, Nancy, is the CFO. So tell us more about this, and any other family members involved. And, you know, I’m interested, do you think having the family so heavily invested in the business works well?

00:07:34,996 –> 00:09:09,156 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah, so I mean, I, I think it, to me, it’s imperative because, well, you know, while you don’t really wanna put all your eggs in one basket, when you put all your eggs in one basket, you will do everything you can to make sure that basket succeeds, and that’s where we’re at. So, uh, actually, when Daniel joined in 2010, I was kinda waiting for him to finish grad school at Purdue also, and his wife also, and they both were working for me a little while. Uh, she’s a chemical engineer, so we don’t really use chemical engineers that, you know, much with what we’re doing, but she did work for us a little bit.

And then, uh, my other two son-in-laws, Jake, is still working for me, he’s the head of sales, and another one, and my youngest daughter also work for me. They’re both were in software development. And, uh, you know, I’m looking forward to having grandkids join us soon here. I’m already thinking about the 11-year-old getting in here to learn how to solder and do a bunch of different things, you know, as we build, build things. Uh, but yeah, I think it’s… To me, it’s very important that the, the family’s involved because it’s like, we are going to make this work. We are not in it for the short run, we don’t have any investors, you know, that we gotta be hold to. I am the investor. Or we, I should say we are the investors, ’cause it’s our time, and if it benefits, if we do well, we benefit. If we fail, it’s, it’s all on us. To me, that, that is really good. And I also like the idea of, you know, I’ve got 17 grandkids and they’re not all gonna work for me, obviously.

But, uh, you know, some, some might be in some capacity, whether it’s helping do the lidar or doing some service work, I can help them with that, or helping us… We have a farm, too. We raise, like, over 1,000 sheep and about 100 cattle. Uh, so you know, they got, we got a lot of diversity that we can work with there. So yeah, it’s important. And the, the non-family members, I didn’t realize it, but there were, like, four or five of them at one point, and they were all left-handed, and I’m the only left-handed one in my family until one of the grandkids came along. So it’s just interesting that we’re all left-handed. But I think that’s… I love it. We have our spats every now and then, especially me and, uh, the son. But, uh, you know, I want… Part of what we do is I want the company to grow beyond me, beyond my lifespan. And that means I need to have people that I can hand it off to, so I pretty much got that under wraps.

00:10:14,876 –> 00:10:57,956 [Stewart Walker]
Yeah. That, I can see all the strengths. Yes, indeed. And, certainly when I was there, the atmosphere was very pleasant. And you mentioned the farming, and I noticed at the entrance to your facility when I was there, the sign said, “Fagerman Farm,” and you told me all about hair sheep. You mentioned sheep there, and the hair sheep is an unusual breed, superb lamb. It’s almost the kind of ovine equivalent of, of Wagyu. So that, I mean, to me, 1,000 sheep and 100 cattle sounds enormous, a huge workload. The farm is continuing to grow and, and has its, uh, life alongside your, uh, lidar business?

00:10:59,716 –> 00:11:04,836 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yes, it absolutely does. Uh, sometimes we’re not sure what business we’re in anymore because, because we’re doing so much. I mean, I sit there and look at it, I’m 64 years old, and I’m like, all my friends are retiring, and I’m like, “How come I don’t even get home until at least 9:00 PM every night?” I mean, and it’s not like I was lounging around. I mean, I’ve been, I’m out bush hogging or cutting hay or we’re tagging sheep or… The last few weeks is called, we’ve had so much rain that it knocked my fences down and, because of beavers dammed up some stuff, and the cows got out. And when do you find out the cows are out? Uh, about 10, 10:00 PM to midnight, that’s when you find out. And so I’m out walking through swamps, waist-deep water, looking for the cows. What a great time.

00:11:53,036 –> 00:11:53,046 [Stewart Walker]
Yeah!

00:11:53,046 –> 00:12:01,436 [Jeff Fagerman]
… but it is a good thing, it is a good time, and I mean, I enjoy it. I wouldn’t change any of it, really. Other, better fences, but, uh, yeah.

00:12:01,436 –> 00:12:33,316 [Stewart Walker]
Yeah, you’ve just had an amazing career. Now, another part of this when I visited your facility, you had just completed A new building. I was in it, a brand new building for product assembly, for offices, uh, and so on. And you were starting work on another structure, which you said would be partly open so you could do training inside it, both in rainy conditions that you just talked about, and very hot conditions. So has that building been completed? Have there been any other changes on your campus?

00:12:33,316 –> 00:12:51,436 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah. So that originally was gonna be like, you know, a beach tent with gravel, so, you know, we wouldn’t roast when we’re out there doing our field work and, uh, stuff like that. And it turned into a three double stall garage with 10-foot tall doors and a 10-foot tall second story on top of it.

00:12:52,496 –> 00:13:25,156 [Jeff Fagerman]
And yeah, so that’s grown drastically. It, it became way bigger than we ever anticipated. And, uh, now as we expand, like, into more drone production, ’cause that’s where we’re headed, uh, this top floor of that may end up being dedicated just to manufacturing drones. Not, not sure yet, but yeah, we’ve definitely … We’ve all the space we built, and we, we literally do the building ourselves, um, but we somehow manage to fill it with everything almost immediately.

00:13:25,156 –> 00:13:26,296 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm.

00:13:26,296 –> 00:13:26,706 [Jeff Fagerman]
There you go.

00:13:26,706 –> 00:13:39,356 [Stewart Walker]
Well, again, congratulations. Now, obviously the company’s growing. You’re privately owned, so you probably don’t wanna talk about revenue or profits, but can you say how many people you’ve got now? Can you say that?

00:13:39,356 –> 00:13:44,396 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah, we have, we keep the number at around 10 people. 10-12 people.

00:13:44,396 –> 00:13:52,296 [Stewart Walker]
Yeah, which is controllable, and you don’t need lots of other people to look after the people.

00:13:52,296 –> 00:14:10,746 [Jeff Fagerman]
Correct. We were, we were up to, like, 20, and we never fire anybody. We never lay anybody off. I mean, I gotta tell you, some, some of them as we grow, we take people from, with no background. If they have an aptitude to learn and are quick learners and want to, have initiative, they come in with zero background in what we do and after one or two years, somebody’s offered them, you know, $50 an hour or more to come work for them. Well, we’re not o- we’re not paying them quite that much because we knew, we hired them when they were, you know literally, like, making $8 an hour, let’s say.

So, you know, and we, we put them up, we brought them up to a lot more than that. But engineering firms come in and they’re like, “Wow, that guy already knows how to do everything,” you know? “Let’s offer him something he can’t refuse.” And I love it when they do that. I mean, I hate losing the people, but I love to see them growing, you know, and, and other people prospering as well.

00:14:47,136 –> 00:14:59,556 [Stewart Walker]
Okay. Well, a slightly different question. We’re seeing in our televisions every night there’s a lot of conflict, there’s a lot of uncertainty around the world. Do you think that affects the UAV-lidar market?

00:15:01,276 –> 00:15:18,226 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yes. It absolutely does. Uh, one is, you know, there’s a lot of interest, if you’re manufacturing a, a UAV and somebody approaches you and says, “We’d like you to, you know, make this drone do X, Y, Z,” and it usually involves dropping something really enticing for a lot of companies…

00:15:23,076 –> 00:15:23,476 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm.

00:15:23,476 –> 00:15:49,236 [Jeff Fagerman]
…which is ’cause there’s a lot more money in that market than there is in mapping. So yeah, it, it, that’s disruptive alone, but then the worldwide spectrum of things, you know, which countries have certain laws for importing, the tariffs and all that kind of stuff, it definitely impacts us, for sure. And then of course with the DGI thing, the compliance list and things that are banned, that definitely makes it difficult, especially when DGI does do an awesome job building drones. I mean, since 2016, I think nobody can say that they built a shabby product. They’ve all been rock solid, and that’s kind of like the standard you’re competing against for all, anybody else, whether it’s American, European, or wherever else, you’re competing against that product or a product line. It definitely makes a difference.

00:16:22,096 –> 00:16:25,286 [Stewart Walker]
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00:16:57,856 –> 00:17:00,736 [Stewart Walker]
Okay, Jeff, let, let’s turn to the, the technology. Your company’s core competencies lie in integrating GNSS IMU systems, cameras, lidar, other sensors onto UAVs, and complementing these hardware and firmware integrations with high quality software. Is that a fair summary?

00:17:19,656 –> 00:17:21,996 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah, that pretty much wraps it up.

00:17:21,996 –> 00:17:49,336 [Stewart Walker]
And you’ve got a big product range. I looked on your website, spent a bit of time there. You’ve got pages on Liberty 64. We’ll come to that one, that one later. It’s, it’s a little bit, uh, special. And then there’s Surveyor 16, Surveyor 32, Surveyor 32 Max, Revolution 120, Surveyor Mini V2, Surveyor Mini V3, Surveyor High Accuracy Series, Highway Mapper Series, more than a dozen different UAVs.

00:17:50,636 –> 00:17:57,136 [Stewart Walker]
Can you give us a sort of a quick tour of all those products so we can put it in perspective?

00:17:57,136 –> 00:23:15,592 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah. It is a difficult thing because we have integrated with so many different products on all ranges. I mean, on the cameras, we’ve done a slew of cameras, you know, from just a RGB to a multi-spectral, hyper-spectral. And then on the IMUs, INSs, you know, the different IMUs, just whether you can use a entire INS, which has a GPS, uh, receiver and the IMU already integrated. And then again, just different, uh, graph- uh, GNSS receivers and different IMUs as well. And then with the laser scanners, we’ve done, like, four dozen, probably at least four dozen laser scanners. They don’t all come to market because you build them and you’re like, “Okay, that’s really good.” You might like that company, you know, for whatever reason, uh, the size is right, the weight is right, but you’ve already got a product or you have another product that’s very similar to it, so you kinda, you can’t…

It’s hard to offer both when they’re kinda competing. Um, you know, every, every one of the products has to have some advantage, one over the other. And so that gives us, while we’ve done, like, four dozen, we might have like 10 different systems. And so if you’re really interested in a super high definition, you want the finest quality on the road type scan, that would be, you know, you’re gonna build a system with a ZNF, ZNF Profiler. I mean, that gives just absolutely beautiful data. If the FARO did as well, but the FARO, when spun at like 100 hertz, and the ZNF spins at 200 hertz, which was important because a lot of contracts called for 200 hertz. So ZNF did that. It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s not gonna go on a UAV. Delivers amazing data on a, on a vehicle, and it’s used in a lot of railway applications, and you can have it as a, you know, single or dual-headed ’cause that…

So that’s on the really, really high end. And then you progress down through to other systems. You know, any of the RIEGL scanners, uh, used to be a Velodyne was the 800-pound gorilla in the room ’cause they, you know, now they don’t exist. They merged with Ouster basically. Uh, you know, they were focused on autonomous vehicles, but their first laser scanner from DARPA was that HD-64, which is big and kinda clumsy. We never did integrate that one because before we looked at that, the HD-32 came along. HD-32 was the workhorse. It ruled for, uh, almost 10 years ’cause it was 32 lasers, 700,000 points a second, dual return. It was amazing. Uh, you know, just a few things we would like to have seen to improve it, unfortunately, that never happened with them. Um, but then, you know, you come in, keep going forward, now we’ve got, uh, you had Quanergy, and Septent, and now the Chinese manufacturers, Hesai, Robosense, all the other scanners.

They all offer some advantage, one over the other, whether it’s cost, uh, laser distribution, point density, better intensity, better range, lighter weight. Uh, you know, we gotta weigh all those things in to come up with do we wanna attack that particular scanner or not. There’s not many scanners we’ve kind of just like said, “No, we don’t wanna look at.” Um, more, more, those have been more on the automotive side. Uh, we haven’t done all of those ’cause they’re, they get to kinda get similar. They’re, they’re just so very similar, there’s not enough to warrant chasing after that particular product line. But yeah, so very high end, and I don’t wanna call them low end, but they’re not, you know, delivering millimeter type work. They’re d- one to two centimeters, which if you’re doing GIS mapping, which is the majority of the work really, um, you know, identifying the telephone poles, the curb and gutter kinda stuff like that, uh, you don’t need as an expensive system, and they generally want it smaller. And then, oh, I want it on a UAV, and on a car, or handheld, or on a backpack.

So, you know, we’re trying to think a little bit ahead of everybody and build a system that can do all that. Um, makes it complicated, makes it challenging, but you know, we want to make it so that the product that the company invest in, that they can get a good ROI on it in a hurry. It, it’s gotta be something they can capture back in a hurry. It can’t be a five-year long recapture ’cause in five years the technology changes way too much. So it’s like really they need to be able to recapture their investment in a year or less than a year. So that’s kind of the goal.

And right now, this is the opportune time. If you can’t capture it back on virtually any one of our products, if you can’t make that money back easily and pay for your employees and everything else in a year, then you don’t have enough business or you’re not marketing yourself right ’cause you definitely can do it. So that, that, we always keep it in mind with that, why would we build this product, you know, and then what the price has to be, um, if it was worthwhile and is there enough? ‘Cause we would do some one-off products along the way, but those kinda drag you away from mainstream, and so we try to stay with the mainstream product line.

00:23:17,492 –> 00:23:44,952 [Stewart Walker]
Okay. So turning to software, you, you have extensive software. Two of the products are called ScanLook and PPK, and I, I find the latter interesting. It, it generates the UAV trajectories from the raw GNSS and IMU data. Now, a lot of companies leave that portion of the software to specialists like SBG Systems, or RIEGL, or Trimble or Applanix, but you do it yourself.

00:23:46,072 –> 00:23:49,852 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah, I mean, it’s, there’s advantages. We, we try not to reinvent the wheel, just like back when I worked at Integraph, we didn’t wanna reinvent all the bundle adjustments that were out there because there were already a bunch of really, really good ones…

00:23:58,812 –> 00:23:59,152 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm

00:23:59,152 –> 00:24:40,096 [Jeff Fagerman]
… and they were very specific. So we try not to reinvent that, and especially if the customer already owns, like back in the old days, if you already own a bundle adjustment and you’re buying this photogrammetry package, you don’t wanna pay for yet another bundle adjustment and learn it again. So we try to look the same way, on the INS and just everything we do here. The only time we will go ahead and do that is if we think we can give some significant advantage, whether it’s in price or functionality or in workflow. And this has been largely due to workflow is why we’ve done this, because that’s the stumbling block kind of.

That’s, that’s been, aside from price, the whole PPK part, the whole coordinate system part, has been the stumbling block because it’s like a lot of the customers we sell to, they don’t know anything about coordinate systems and cartography and map projections and datums and stuff like that. I mean, they may be surveyors, but let’s face it, most surveyors work in a two or three county radius or maybe a, a certain part of a state. They don’t sell like Alabama. We work in Alabama East and Alabama West, and you know which counties pretty much are in which one. So you could say that you’re an expert on one or the other, but really not really so much. You’ve got a template you go by.

But as companies get bigger, you get customers that are all over the country, all over the globe. You gotta have a product that can just, you know, it’s like it works just as well in Alabama East as it does in Tennessee North or whatever, or a Michigan coordinate system, or wherever you’re at, or even to Canada with the MTM systems they have. But so that’s the stumbling block is picking out the datums and the coordinate system and all that. So we try to streamline that, and it’s not easy. It’s of course, the math behind it all is like, almost like rocket science, but it’s the presentation. The user’s gotta be able to grasp it easy and not stumble there. Stumble, fall, and never fall and get back up again. So that’s why we’ve had to pursue that, that part of the market as well. We didn’t really want to. We’ve tried to avoid that, and even now we’re looking further down the road in that market as to how to improve even beyond where we’re at right now.

00:26:21,536 –> 00:27:04,836 [Stewart Walker]
So on the, on the lidar side, I mean, I’ve looked obviously at your own company and some of your competitors, and everyone seems to do some kind of quick look software product so that you can, um, do some quality control, um, perhaps even when the UAV is still in the air. And then you’ve got your mainstream, um, processing to, to, to get the point cloud from the raw data and, uh, generate some deliverables from that. And then maybe down at the end, your customers will use some specialist third party product for, for particular deliverables. Does that description cover your situation as well?

00:27:04,836 –> 00:27:28,486 [Jeff Fagerman]
It does. You wanna have live feedback while you’re collecting to at least know you’re collecting. That’s the biggest thing. In our very first days of doing this, we used to show the live lidar, all this stuff, even when you’re driving, whatever, and that was great for a demo. But in reality, we’d just like turn it on, see that it’s running, shut it down, let it run. I mean, nobody wants to know. It’s like the autonomous car type stuff even. You know, you don’t wanna have to sit there and be babysitting your autonomous car. I’m usually fighting the steering wheel ’cause it’s trying to drive me towards the middle. So our lidar system’s the same way.

We (say) the less the user has to know in the field to operate it, the better it is, and that’s kind of we, we focus on that just to make it, it’s gotta be rock solid. So when you turn it on, you say go, you know it’s going. Now, the, the argument is, is, you know, like, you know, are you getting sufficient coverage? Well, that’s called a little bit of planning, and you gotta have just a little bit of smarts involved in that, and you do it a couple times and you’ve got that. Uh, as opposed to babysitting when you’re watching. But as the pilot, if you’re the pilot of a UAV, you honestly don’t have time to sit there and be looking at the screen. You’re supposed to be watching the vehicle. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing. But you wanna know that it’s running and everything’s being collected.

And when you land, you, you know, you do wanna be able to do a real quick review. Like, did I get everything? Yes, I got everything. Everything’s good to go. So we’re, we’re right there with you on that, ’cause nobody wants to drive back to the site. Um, we ourselves do some custom, uh, some service work, not very much, but when we do, it’s usually on gigantic jobs. And so if we’re scanning 100 to 200 miles a day and we’re gonna move throughout a state, we wanna make sure we, we know before we leave, within an hour or two of when we land, that we have everything. So we make sure that our customers likewise can have that confidence that they can know that.

00:29:11,856 –> 00:29:12,016 [Stewart Walker]
Now, before I visited you back in 2019, we, we had some to and fro by email, and you happened to indicate at, at that time that you were a little bit skeptical about AI. Well, we’ve moved on seven years. How do you feel now and how much AI is there going on in your software?

00:29:31,536 –> 00:29:33,856 [Jeff Fagerman]
As of about two months ago or a month ago, I would say I was still skeptical. Now, well, I would still say I’m skeptical, but I would say it is truly absolutely amazing. I don’t think it’s what people think it is, really. But it is still absolutely amazing what it can do, and I think it is gonna change stuff for us. It’s gonna drastically change stuff for us. I mean, in our industry, every industry—well, not every industry, but a lot of industries. I think a lot of people will probably be freed up to choose other opportunities. I think that’s the best way to say it.

And that, that is kind of how I see it, is if you don’t have to sit there and be drawing this line every day and the computer can do it for you, great. You can go off and do something that, you know, the computer can’t do, like chasing cows through the swamp. But it does it, the AI is definitely gonna expedite processes a lot. It’s going to improve things, I think, probably one or two orders of magnitude beyond what we think it can do. And, you know, back 25, 30, 30, 40 years ago, we used to hear things about, in the photogrammetry market, called snakes. I don’t know if you remember that or not.

00:30:52,832 –> 00:30:54,592 [Stewart Walker]
I remember snakes, yes, yeah.

00:30:54,592 –> 00:31:06,032 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah, you know, all that. And, yeah, he may have worked for the company that was working on that one. I think it weren’t anybody else. But it never really materialized, you know, the whole building following stuff and everything. But now that stuff is actually happening. That’s just how long it’s taken for it to happen, but it’s just taking, you know, super high-speed computers, and large language model, and compression, and all these things to, to bring it about. I mean, it’s been going on for 70 years, longer than us. But yeah, it’s gonna make a big difference. I think it’s gonna make a big difference in ways we can’t even anticipate.

00:31:31,112 –> 00:31:34,132 [Stewart Walker]
Yes. I think that’s right. I was talking, I think it was Trimble I was talking to at InterGEO last year, and, or it may have been GeoWeek, doesn’t matter.

00:31:44,312 –> 00:31:54,692 [Stewart Walker]
They’ve got some AI going on so that when the surveyor goes out into the field, the tablet that comes with the total station sort of tells him what to do.

00:31:56,772 –> 00:31:57,311 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah. I can believe that.

00:31:57,312 –> 00:32:00,072 [Stewart Walker]
It was impressive. There’s no question it was impressive.

00:32:01,112 –> 00:32:15,652 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yes. I was using it, uh, just this morning actually to do something, and it told me that it was training this other thing to know how to do it right. I’m like, “That was interesting, that one AI was teaching the other AI how to properly do this job.”

00:32:15,652 –> 00:32:15,692 [Stewart Walker]
Yep.

00:32:15,692 –> 00:32:16,512 [Jeff Fagerman]
Okay!

00:32:18,152 –> 00:32:49,232 [Stewart Walker]
All right. Well, going to something lighter, I’ve always noticed on your website, your exhibition booths and flyers, you give product prices quite a lot, although one of your competitors, GeoCue, is also pretty open with, with pricing. But you, you really seem to enjoy so-called charm or psychological pricing with heavy use of the digit nine, such as $29,990.99 for a Surveyor 120 system. Has that marketing strategy worked out for you?

00:32:50,352 –> 00:33:07,172 [Jeff Fagerman]
Oh, that is the psychology of marketing. Um, that’s where the two Stoner laws come into play. They’re the ones who studied all that stuff in school, and it’s like, you know, when you buy gas, it used to be $2.99 a gallon, now it’s $4.99 a gallon or, or more, but it’s always something .99 a gallon, right?

00:33:07,172 –> 00:33:07,592 [Stewart Walker]
Yeah.

00:33:07,592 –> 00:33:28,892 [Jeff Fagerman]
So there has to be something psychological to it that makes a difference. So does it work? Yeah, I don’t know that it really does, but it definitely grabs it. I know people like to see the price because they know where they’re starting. Now, I mean, I’ll, I’ll tell you quite honestly, I love Applied Imagery’s, QT Modeler software. If you’ve ever used it or not, it’s amazing. It can display and manipulate lidar faster than any other product on the market, and that’s, that’s why it’s, like, the only product, software product I know that’s actually ITAR restricted. So, I reached it in the old days, I would literally just walk right by their booth because I’m like, I didn’t know what the pricing was. I saw what it could do, and I’m like, “That thing’s gotta cost, like, $30,000.”

00:33:55,912 –> 00:34:02,492 [Jeff Fagerman]
And one day I stopped in and I said, “Well, I’m gonna talk to him,” ’cause I try to talk to everybody, you know. It’s like, I was way off on the price. Way off. And now we probably have 10 or 15 copies ourselves of QT Modeler ’cause, I mean, it’s an amazing piece of software. But not having any idea what the price prohibited me from even stopping to talk to him. ‘Cause I just look at it and saw dollar signs, you know, big, big bucks.

00:34:22,732 –> 00:34:23,292 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm.

00:34:23,292 –> 00:34:36,632 [Jeff Fagerman]
And so we try to be open on that ’cause I think I don’t want people to think, uh, get the cold shoulder that, you know, our price is way out in left field. I mean, now we’re not DJI either. We can’t do that, but, you know, we’re not, you know, way out there beyond reason.

00:34:41,352 –> 00:35:32,712 [Stewart Walker]
Okay. All right. Well, now getting into something a little bit heavier. Whenever you talk about UAVs, the regulatory environment soon comes into the conversation, and back when we were all first involved, in the US we had these FAA Section 333 exemptions or waivers. And then in August 2016, we moved on to so-called Part 107, which still applies, and it covers a lot of operations, although there’s a limit on different regulations for big, heavy UAVs. And then there are regulations around BVLOS, beyond visible line of sight, regulations around night flying, and the regulations vary from country to country. How far do you think we’ve come along this m- path, and where are the pain points at the moment?

00:35:34,032 –> 00:35:38,632 [Stewart Walker]
What comes next, and do you have to discuss this with, with your customers all the time?

00:35:40,312 –> 00:36:01,022 [Jeff Fagerman]
The customers really, honestly, they don’t ask us about that. They know about Part 107, and, and honestly, everything that you mentioned, section, uh, 333, I remember we were on that list for forever and, you know, basically, when you’re on that list for forever, you’re gonna stay on that list for forever because they only process, you know, a handful every year, basically, it seems like.

00:36:01,022 –> 00:36:01,392 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm. Yes.

00:36:01,392 –> 00:37:25,428 [Jeff Fagerman]
So Part 107 was like, oh my goodness, it was like salvation. You hear, uh, part, the Part 107 in 2016 and the DJI M600, those two things are what completely changed, uh, imaging and lidar on a UAV. Those were the showstoppers and, and made the huge difference. And I say the DJI because- Finally, there was a product that could fly and didn’t just wander off into the woods aimlessly, and its price wasn’t insane. It was very reliable, it was easy to fly, everything was great, and you had that 107 on it, so you could go take your test. Um, you know, it’s not like it’s a really hard test to take or anything. Um, but you know, you, you gotta know your stuff to do it, and that’s good. Yeah, beyond the 333, it was impossible.

And, and actually up until that point, I would’ve said Canada and Australia were way ahead of us, and then all of a sudden, bam, we just went so far ahead of them and they still haven’t caught up. And I don’t think any of the other countries have really caught up except for maybe the countries that have no regulations or very little. Um, so I think we’re sitting good. The, and then the BVLOS stuff and even the night flying, you know, most of our clients, I would say most of the guys in our industry are selling to surveyors largely. That the bulk of the customers. They’re not working in the dark most of the time.

00:37:25,428 –> 00:37:25,848 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm.

00:37:25,848 –> 00:37:36,628 [Jeff Fagerman]
I mean, yeah, the, the guys that do the mining stuff, that’s a very, very niche market. They’re in the dark, whether you’re daytime or nighttime, it doesn’t matter. That… They don’t even have to worry about any laws like that ’cause they’re in a mine. So they just go down there and whatever. But, uh, the nighttime and the, now the beyond line of sight stuff, that, yes, with the fixed wing and particularly, or the longer flying drones, and we even have now a drone, uh, quad-copters that can fly for an hour and 50 minutes, and they, with a payload on it, so it’s a long time, and you can cover a lot of stuff, and you, you definitely cover beyond line of sight.

‘Cause even when you can fly at 400 feet and you got a good lidar system that has no problem getting to the ground, giving accurate results, getting all the wires and everything from 400 feet, still, unless you live in, you know, the, the plains or the, where you have just gigantic fields with no trees, the trees eventually block your view of the drone, so you can only fly so far, and so you’re quote unquote working, you know, unsighted.

00:38:31,048 –> 00:38:37,068 [Jeff Fagerman]
So I don’t think that the beyond line of sight’s that big a deal until you get to, like, the corridor mapping, and for a lot of the corridor mapping, if you were to follow those corridors, you always look at it and think, “Man, I don’t know how they put that thing in there,” ’cause it’s like you can’t take an ATV or anything through there. Yeah, well, they, they didn’t. You know, they used helicopters to do a lot of that. And I would say that’s a good way to scan it even now is with a helicopter, and they’re, ’cause they’re not that expensive, and the pilots always wanna come home, so you know, don’t want everybody to crash or anything like that. So that’s kind of what we advocate, you know, for that, and, and a lot of our customers actually are pilots, oddly enough. So they can fly their own helicopter or an airplane. But most of the, most of it, just part 107. It, it’s great. There is the BVLOS stuff, but that’s just, that’s a much smaller market.

00:39:23,648 –> 00:40:15,828 [Stewart Walker]
Right. Well, may- maybe the other regulatory, issue that’s not far from people’s lips is this so-called NDAA compliant systems. In other words, systems that do not include components in certain categories from certain companies in certain countries, and NDAA comes from the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020. So my understanding is that federal agencies and contractors cannot buy new systems unless they are compliant. So it means, say, that firms working on contracts related to government at any level can’t use UAVs from DJI or lidar sensors from, among others, CHC Navigation and Hesai. Ha- have I got, got that right? How have you been affected? And tell us about your Liberty 64 system.

00:40:15,828 –> 00:40:20,128 [Jeff Fagerman]
Yeah, so I mean, that, that’s correct, and, and there’s a lot of people that are cautious about buying those kind of products, but then most of them, most of them are doing land surveying, so they’re not working for the federal government, so they really don’t care.

00:40:31,108 –> 00:40:31,208 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm.

00:40:31,208 –> 00:41:12,348 [Jeff Fagerman]
That’s, that’s what it comes down to. Now, as they become, let’s say, more educated, uh, sometimes that’s a problem. They become more educated and they’re like, “Oh, well, we can’t do that.” And we’re like, “Well, are you doing that?” “No, we’re not doing that.” They’re like, “Why is that? Is that a, is that a worry?” But we might one day do that. Now, if you were selling the other product, you would really be an advocate for it. You don’t wanna buy a DJI because, you know, you can’t do that government contract, but we’ve never done that. So, you know, you got both sides, so it’s not really that big of an issue, um, on the, on those. And the drone, honestly, is the bigger problem because that’s the one that’s communicating. The laser is just emitting, you know, a laser beam out and response back. So, um, but I think the ones that are on that list, which that list is passed by law every year, right? So it’s at the, or even more than that, it’s at the whims of Congress who’s, who’s on and who’s off that list. Um, yeah, it’s a, it’s a tricky slope, and you know, you can buy a product from a company right next door to the other company who’s banned, but they’re not on the list yet.

00:41:38,608 –> 00:41:39,428 [Stewart Walker]
Mm-hmm.

00:41:39,428 –> 00:41:53,698 [Jeff Fagerman]
You can be sure that they probably will be on that list, so you gotta be careful. And so, so yeah, the Liberty 64, which uses the Ouster, uh, which is an American-made product, uh, they’re the ones who merged with or bought or however you wanna call it, with Velodyne. They got a new sensor, uh, and actually they just released now in the last few weeks the True Color lidar, which that is one thing that will truly set them apart from all the other lidar vendors is that they do true color, so they’re receiving the color back. When they’re getting intensity, they’re also getting color at the same time. It’s not a colorizing process, it’s true color coming back in with it. And, and now they got the, at the same time, they released the 256 channel Uh, sensor.

I mean, it’s still dual return, and it’s, you know, it’s not as accurate as the high accuracy ones, but boy, does it give you some data. And the question then is, is it good enough? And for a lot of work, it is good enough. And so if, if it’s good enough, and the price is right, the size is right, and the function’s right, and it’s reliable, which I think are some of the things that they’re really good at, then, I mean, that is, it is a viable option. Now, it’s not the option for everything. If you want longer range, they’re not gonna give you a longer range. If you need to be able to get the smaller, finer power lines, you know, or more accuracy or whatever, you gotta be careful. But, um, I’ve always had high hopes for Ouster from day one.

I think they’re pushing that way. As technology keeps changing, we’ll see. I would like to see an American company step back to the forefront, and they’re making the effort to do that. So that’s what the Liberty 64 is. So it uses 64 lasers. 64 is double what we had before with the Velodyne 32, double what we have with the Hesai 32. Uh, 64 is a lot. When you’re pumping out that many points, millions of points as opposed to hundreds of thousands of points, you know, and you’re going over trees, some of those lasers, because the angle of incidence, you got 64 different angles coming in. Some of them, if you’re not in Hawaii or shooting through lily pads or shooting through kudzu, something’s gonna make it through that top layer of vegetation, and hopefully some of it’s gonna make it to the ground. And so it just increases that likelihood. I haven’t seen the 256 yet, but, I can only imagine that, it’s gonna be a real benefit. So I’m hopeful.

00:44:13,636 –> 00:45:12,116 [Stewart Walker]
Yes. Well, the, the magazine has been involved a little bit with Ouster. I went to their, their, uh, offices in San Francisco, had a great day there, and wrote it up, and then I did a podcast with their CEO, Angus Pacala. He’s an impressive guy. And then we’ve got an old friend of yours as well as mine, Ron Roth, is writing odd, um, or occasional short pieces for the magazine, and his first one is about this new Ouster technology, and that’ll be in the next issue. So we’re at a really interesting time, I think, and as you say, it’s an American company producing leading edge products. Well, Jeff, you know, I feel as if we could sit here for another couple of hours and, and chat, but we’ve both got things to move on to. So could I end by asking you what your, your plans are for the rest of this year and, and further beyond? You’ve, you’ve talked about having all the family members to ensure the longevity of the, the company, but what about the product side over the next year or two?

00:45:17,116 –> 00:45:18,536 [Jeff Fagerman]
Well, I think you’re gonna see an unveiling of our new line of drones at Commercial UAV Expo, which should be … It may not be shocking, but they’re gonna be reliable, made here, and high quality, and have really long flight times, and very well integrated with our systems. You’re gonna see some new laser systems coming out that I think are pretty doggone amazing, uh, that release, remove some of the limitations we’ve had with the 400 feet, not being able to see stuff from 400 feet, and still maintain good ground coverage and accuracy. And I think you’ll see some movement on the camera side, which I don’t wanna say too much about yet, but it looks extremely promising.

00:46:04,766 –> 00:46:04,796 [Stewart Walker]
Okay.

00:46:04,796 –> 00:46:06,196 [Jeff Fagerman]
So that, that’s where we’re headed.

00:46:06,196 –> 00:46:09,636 [Stewart Walker]
We will await Commercial UAV Expo very eagerly. So Jeff, thank you very much indeed. I, as I’ve just said, I enjoyed this conversation. I’m grateful that you were able to participate in the LIDAR Magazine podcast series. Listeners will surely have been impressed with, uh, what LiDAR USA is doing and some of the company’s special characteristics. We wish you well with growing the business and the technology in the years to come.

00:46:36,296 –> 00:46:40,076 [Jeff Fagerman]
Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure and a blessing as well. Thank you.

00:46:41,096 –> 00:47:10,735 [Stewart Walker]
So finally, I want to underline our gratitude to our sponsor, the popular LAS Tools lidar processing software, and we hope that listeners will join us for forthcoming podcasts. We’ve got some interesting guests lined up. If you want to ask anything about our podcasts or make any comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to write to us. Thank you for listening, and have a good day.

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