First, while I don’t know the details of the geotagging issues that DroneDeploy is reporting, we have been running mapping flights the Mavic Air MANUALLY (what a royal pain) and the image sets that are returned, with whatever geotagging is occurring, is stitched together just fine by the DroneDeploy systems. Perhaps this is a testament to how good their algorithms are in spite of accuracy issues.
In any event, DJI Mobile SDK 4.5, which enabled Mavic Air support, is working with the betas of some <cough, cough> competing piloting software so I’m sure DroneDeploy will get it working soon.
How well are your ortho’s matching up to other known good map sources? Mine look great stand alone but are off by several meters when trying to overlay them on some known good maps. DJI needs to fix this. The correct high rez data is already there…they just chose not to put it in the right place.
Take a look at one of your Mavic Air images in Photoshop. The EXIF data will show the drone’s position in decimal coordinates carried out to 7 decimal places which converts to about 5 decimal places worth of seconds in DMS format. Unfortunately these are the wrong tags…
The GPS data tags that get used by mapping programs is DMS format and it is rounded to the nearest whole second by DJI. 1 second of Lat is equal to 24.384 meters and 1 second of Long is equal to 30.87 meters. Leaves a ton of room for error!
Most other DJI drones don’t have this issue. My understanding is that the Spark also has this low resolution geo tagging issue.
So DD and another mapping app third party are claiming that the rev 4.5 of the SDK did not enable waypoints for the Mavic Air or at least not in the way/manner needed for their mapping apps to work as designed.
So what is different about these mapping apps vs other third party apps (2 that I know of) that have already released beta’s supporting their version of waypoints on the Mavic Air?
I have tried waypoints with Litchi and Autopilot. Both appear to support LCMC and at least Autopilot supports both LCMC and custom flight controller modes.
That being said, what is up with DroneDeploy and their support for the Air? Looks like others are able to do it with multiple different strategies. They even did it within hours of the SDK being released.
I question how serious professionals take the Air and that being the case, I question how many of those that voted for Drone Deploy to support it would actually pay for the service. I’ve always seen the Air as a portable back-up or a toy. Doesn’t explain why competitors are working on it but just my take on it.
Personally I’d prefer DD to use their resources to improve the software and iron out the bugs for its current line-up.
I just mapped a 60 acre waste water plant with 700 pictures with what you call a toy. I doubt anyone could tell the difference in the results vs a Phantom 4 Pro.
I didn’t say t wasn’t capable of good results, of course it is, but I wouldn’t have thought it would be first choice to carry out the task for most businesses. Most of the responses above (if not all) are from brand new members with their brand new toys so I can be forgiven for thinking most bought their drone before discovering what more cool they can do with it. Obviously not all, but I doubt there would be many Air owners wishing to part with a subscription fee so I would understand why DD would be reluctant to divert their resources, if indeed they were.
My experience was that the Mavic has a narrower FOV meaning that I had to fly higher. None of the 3 maps I did we’re as accurate as the P4P with GCPs. RMSE’s were still below 3" though so not any, but most people may not see the difference.
If you mean the Mavic Air, the geo tags are rounded to the nearest second which leaves some pretty good room for error. Hopefully DJI will fix that soon.
Hopefully, but a 1/2.3" sensor and digital shutter with a 12MP camera flying higher just doesn’t compare to a 1" sensor, mechanical shutter and 20MP. The P4 standard is a better comparison.
We rigorously test our software on hardware before announcing official support. We are still going through the testing portion for the Mavic Air and hope to add it to our list of Supported Drones down the road but we do not have a timeline to share for this.
For anyone that is interested, I loaded the new v01.00.0400 firmware that was released for the Mavic Air today and it did not improved the resolution of the geo tags embedded in the images
Any news? Are they in the final stages of testing?
Can we expect anything soon for the Mavic Air?
I hope so, I have the drone and I really like it. I’m just waiting to be able to work with it using DD.
The latest DJI Mobile SDK for both iOS and Android is already updated with Mavic Air support. Given that there are no significant overhauls in the latest SDK update I expected DD would have already a release with Mavic Air support pushed to the App/Play stores at this point. Litchi, Autopilot, and a couple of other apps updated to the new SDK within a week of its release.
