Cascade pipeline

Why cascade?

The cost of a measurement scales with its precision. A satellite pass over a site costs cents; a drone sortie costs dollars; sending a human with an iPhone costs tens to hundreds. If you used the cheapest sensor for everything you’d miss every change smaller than a meter. If you used the most expensive everywhere, you’d go broke before you finished one portfolio.

Cascade flips it: cheapest sensor first, escalate only when something changes. The platform handles the routing automatically.

Tier 1 — Satellite

WaveForm subscribes to commercial-satellite tasking and runs a configurable cadence (typically daily or weekly) over every enrolled site. Each pass produces a low-res raster snapshot anchored to the site polygon.

A change-detection model diffs consecutive snapshots and emits an alert when delta exceeds a per-site threshold. The alert carries a confidence + a bounding box.

Tier 2 — Drone

High-confidence satellite alerts can auto-dispatch a drone sortie. The drone flies a programmed mission over the bounding box at sub-meter resolution. Its captures land on the platform identically to mobile captures — same upload pipeline, same reconstruction backend.

Tier 3 — Mobile LiDAR

When a drone confirms a meaningful change — or when the customer wants metrology-grade ground truth — a human takes WaveForm Field to the site. iPhone-LiDAR capture produces a dense point cloud anchored to the same WGS-84 frame as everything else.

Mobile captures are also the input layer to nav-packs — robot consumption is downstream of human-grade capture.

Where you plug in

• Webhook on alert — your systems get pinged whenever satellite change-detection fires.
• Webhook on snapshot — fires when a tier-3 mobile capture finishes reconstruction, which is when a new nav-pack version usually gets published.
• Manual dispatch — operators can override auto-dispatch in the web app (start a drone sortie outside the alert flow, schedule a mobile walk, etc.).