I have some jobs that require the drone to fly following a road automatically with waypoints previously made in Google Earth. I tested the DJI GS PRO as soon as it was released. But I do not think that works for me. Well, the drone stops at a waypoint. On a road that has many curves the flight logistics is totally compromised, because the drone will have many stops and resumes.
I tested Autopilot. At first it is even good to follow rows. You can import the kmz made in Google Earth directly into the app. But there must be some difference in the map used in Autopilo in relation to Google Earth coordinates. Because when the file is imported into the app, the line drawn differs from what you did.
I just need the drone to follow the line of the road with the camera pointed straight down, vertically relative to the road axis. Is there a way to do this with DroneDeploy? Some help?
I am doing a project that requires I follow storm water drainage runs. Because they curve around, using DD as a flight planner was taking too much flying time photographing unnecessary area that wasted battery time and mapping space. I use Litchi to design linear flight paths and it works great. I do have problem with the “trigger” setting on Litchi as it will start taking photos immediately but I always get an audio warning that triggering has stopped. I just take the photos manually (about every 2 seconds), upload to DD and it makes great maps.
We just released a Linear Flight Planning beta app on our app market. This is specially designed to map thin and long areas of interest. Try the app and let us know what you think of it.
If you fly a map with a single line, you basically have zero sidelap for that flight. Sidelap is needed to help stitch the images together into a connected map. There is a possibility that a straight line could come up with a map in some cases but you need at least 2-3 passes to get a decent map.
You need some sidelap (ideally 2 or 3 flight lines) because during the photogrammetry process the model is generated by locating all the images relative to each other; if the images are in a single straight line there is a degree of freedom about that line axis so the model is essentially free to rotate, and the process is unable to accurately determine where the ground is. If the line bends this effect is diminished, but the best bet is to have a few parallel tracks to fully determine which direction is up and which is down.
@Alex_Rodrigues since its an app on our marketplace, they are currently unavailable for offline use. We are working on to make them available for offline use this quarter.
I would love to see if you are able to make maps using this app. We had a user made this map with 3 flight lines at 80% sidelap, http://drdp.ly/xSZATP . Probably don’t need such high sidelap, 60% may work fine. But better safe in first trials.
Quite a blurry example @manu. And I disagree that 2 or more flight lines are needed for stitching. With enough frontlap (85%+), a single line of nadir images should (and does, in my testing) work just fine.
a single line is ok for connecting the images, but it affects that accuracy of where the map is on the base map due to not being able to easily determine where the ground is. A good amount of the users we help at DD with failed maps are trying to stitch together lines of single images.
I’ve had the battery icon showing empty for my grid missions as well. I see it right at takeoff, so I land and restart the mission. I haven’t had it come back twice in a row. I wouldn’t dare fly without the battery % showing.
@MBlacklin I updated the linear mapping app to be able to fly 1 path. You can try it out and see if it works well. Please do share your results if you can so we can learn how the resulting map looks like.
