Hello everyone.
Can anyone advise me on the optimum altitude and overlap settings for a mission to inspect panels on a solar farm please?. The panels will be set at an angle of about 20* to the horizontal. The images would need to detail dust, animal and leaf coverage as well as any other damage.
You didn’t mention if you were using an RGB camera or Thermal.
I would go out and do some short flights to experiment at different settings.
I would start about 120 feet with 80/80 overlaps and do some higher and lower.
See what the optimum settings work out to be.
Hi Gary. Thanks for your reply. I’m using RGB.
If you need good resolution try to do your fly with no more than 20 mts high, you have to watch about obstruction because could be on the way some towers or other thing with more than this high.
Hi Icelis. Thank you for your message. There should be nothing directly over the panels but you’re right, at 20 metres it’s possible there will be some obstructions around the perimeter.
Hey @Campilot 
From our experience, flight between 10-15 meters will be optimal. It will be the same height for doing the same inspection in thermal conditions too. Look at the image attached, here you can see that a map created with DD is used as a background map layer. The customer is really happy with this solution
Let me know if I can help further.
Dani,
That’s very helpful, thank you
what’s camera used for the map?
Hi, so this thread is a little old but I was wondering about solar inspections with IR? So DD shows roof inspections and using stitching like any other map though does that work with IR? I am looking at this for a solar farm not rooftops. DD.com makes it look like it can do this but I am not seeing much in terms of user conversation about this. Thanks for any help!
Here is the list of supported drones and cameras. Meaning that they can fly and shoot images autonomously. If your setup isn’t listed you can still upload your imagery manually for mapping and 3D, but their is no functionality for anaylzing the specific characteristics or IR. I regularly upload imagery from a Yuneec H520 E90 RGB and have uploaded from the E10T, but it is thermal and the resolution is quite low so the map and model were obviously a pretty low quality.
