Did you consider adding an additional flight altitude of 10 meters to one of your next versions?
Yes, pilots need to be more careful while using this but a warning message would take a possible responsibility away from you.
What about a terrain which is not flat? A flight plan with a constant distance to the ground which would result in an inclined plane would be nice.
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Hi Martin,
Our internal planning system already stores and queries terrain databases, we’ll be adding this to the app soon.
Good feedback on the 10m altitude, what kinds of use cases are you using this for?
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Thank you Jono
The use cases are car crash analysis and plant type classification.
Very cool stuff - we’ll look into adding an advanced option which would let you tweak these things.
Inclined plane would be nice in some cases, e.g. mines and valleys, but there are other cases where even this presents issues, such as high sided cliffs. At present I would often split this up into two or more missions, flying at the different altitudes, but that looses accuracy and resolution on the cliff so I normally need to run an oblique survey of the cliff face as well, particularly where there are deep caves. Is there a better method?
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That’s a great use-case Roger - we’re looking into some advanced/mission specific flight planning - I’ll reach out to you privately for more information on what you’re looking to do and how we could help with that.
@Jono - I’m also mapping cliff faces and steep verticals. Can you please include me in this conversation?
I’ll post the relevant bits here…
With reference to a couple of our test maps by way of example: 1442594461 and 1442596237 and in particular some of the caves along the eastern edge and the deep cove on the western edge which is showing as a shear vertical cliff.
This is for stability assessment and coastal erosion monitoring where we need to be able track changes and identify at-risk areas (overhangs, shears, lose surfaces, etc). The issue we have is in accuracy and resolution of significant vertical surfaces. The solution is to increase image density around more complex areas and add oblique imagery to larger verticals. The easy way is to do this manually, and ideally you want to follow the guide here on oblique imagery and capture from mutliple heights. However, there are third-party apps currently available (in beta) that allow you to cheat a little with this and semi-automate things. There is currently no automatic way of doing this afaik.
What bird are you flying? With the I1 and P3 you can set and save waypoints for a flight and then set your time lapse and travel speed to get the right shots. every time you go back you can just run the same flight. If you don’t have the intelligent flight controls then I understand. just a thought. Safe flying.
You can do it that way, but it’s not very efficient and a 5 second camera limit is too slow. There is other software out there that does a much better job of opening up advanced flight path options and allows 2 second photos (max SD card will permit). A good case in point is flying a long, vertical cliff face up and back shooting 2 second oblique shots at 20m vertical intervals. We fly one point to point, climb or drop 20m and fly back, repeating until we have the lot. This gets around a limitation in the DJI Waypoint system that prevents setting two waypoints in the same 2D location, but vertically separated. We also use the option to fly partial arcs with fixed a try and exit points - useful for things like an HV pylon assessment where you don’t want to fly across the cables, so split it into two 120 degree arcs.
@rogerpearson Ah I think I see what you mean. Slowing down the air speed uses a lot of battery to make the distance between 5sec shots 20m. What software are you using to get the 2sec intervals? I have not yet tried to set waypoints one above the other. ( I think that is what you mean).
Yeah, DJI doesn’t like waypoints being too close to each other in the horizontal plane, so vertically separated waypoints over the same ground point don’t work.
You have several options. We either use some in-house code or AutoFlightLogic AutoPilot would be our go-to second choice.
Hello Roger,
You had mentioned that you have some in-house code that you use - do you feel comfortable sharing the contact information of the dev’s that you used to produce that code?
Good feedback on the 10m altitude, what kinds of use cases are you using this for?