Feature List/Requests

Just wanted to make a list of all requested features people wanted from the forum and have it in one place.

Will try to update frequently and hopefully some DD people will give some input on, planning to add or can’t implement due to SDK, etc…

Feature requests:

  • Able to save plan/mission before flight - DD Implementing as Desktop planning
  • Ability to undo last moved waypoints / changed waypoint - Released
  • edit saved plan/mission ie move home location, make site bigger/smaller - DD implementing
  • more info about flight ie acreage,number of pictures
  • editing point cloud for better rendering
  • stowed camera position for takeoff and landing - DD implementing
  • cached maps or to fly with limited internet – DD Implementing
  • name survey in app - DD implementing
  • web based mission planning - In Testing
  • faster speed to first waypoint and home from last to save battery
  • video capture
  • show thumbnail pic when captured with pic number - DD working on solution
  • have drone hold heading while capturing - might be a SDK issue
  • touch based waypoint placement without initial box - DD implementing
  • have flight plan calculated after waypoint area completed - might be a option if user wants it
  • Flight Logs for pilot record keeping

Please leave your comments and suggestions below and help DD make a awesome app / service for all to enjoy.

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wanted to explain some of the request by not have it in the list above.

save plan/mission before flight

how i do it right now is by getting on scene and using a different battery then the flight battery and sometime i am not at takeoff location. i make the waypoint list and the then move aircraft to takeoff location change battery and now home location is different or something happens and i have to reset app, now i have to redo everything.

undo last changed waypoint

has happened many times, make a plan and accidentally move a waypoint that i didn’t want to move and i have to start all over again to have the correct layout.

number of pics

would like to know before flight how many pics will be taken so at end of flight all pics were taken

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Hi Andrew,

Thanks for much for putting together this awesome list. We’ve talked a bit internally about whether we should be more open about the bugs/features that are being worked on here. I’d like to add the items we’ve heard through email, etc. to your list but I’ll check with some coworkers first.

We really love having the community involved in the development of the app and seeing the data they create shared.

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Another Idea to save battery and speed up the mission is to have the drone just change direction instead turning the drone in the direction of travel on the ends. I know its not much but every little bit matters.

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Here are some features that I would like to see added:

  • The ability to plan the mission without having to connect to the drone to save battery
  • Instead of the app making the box I would like to be able to touch the corners off the area I want to cover. When you are flying large areas that have a lot of corners it is difficult to get the points where you want them especially when it creates a lot of waypoints when you create a long line.
  • The flight plan does not need to calculated until the area perimeter is set. I have had the app lock up and not generate a flight plan when moving waypoints around too quickly.
  • See a image occasionally during the mission to make sure that it is capturing images.
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  1. We are working on the ability to plan using the desktop which will allow you to plan ahead of time. Following that we will have full offline planning with no internet or drone required.
  2. We’ve had on our list for a while to try and improve the drawing a bit. We are working on an undo button and also making it easier to work with the points.
  3. I’ll chat with the team to see what they think about only calculating the flight plan when the user decides they are done drawing. It would be interesting to know if anybody wants to know while they are drawing where the drone is going to fly or if they only care once they’re ready to fly.
  4. I’d like to be able to show an image as well during the flight. In order to access the image we need to stop capturing and since sometimes have trouble making sure capturing happens consistently we decide to turn on continuous capture and never disable it until the end of the flight.

Would love to be able to use a different base image for flight planning (ie an AgEagle large-acreage NDVI image).

Would love to then set a number of waypoints using single taps. For each of those waypoints, the Inspire flies from a safe altitude to lower altitude for a still georeferenced photo, returns to safe altitude, and does it all over again for the remaining waypoints.

We are planning a few special workflows like this in the future. We’ll let you know when they are coming up so you can test them.

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Could we have base maps coverage in NZ?
Looks like Australia has decent enough resolution (at lower zoom altitudes) but NZ blacks out to just roads rendered in grey when getting to useful planning alts.

Also - could we get the precision flight path option in the .apk? Would love to see what that does to the quality of the 3d models.

We are talking more with the company that provides our base layers. We may use some alternative ones also if a user doesn’t have any tiles. We hope to have some solution in the near future.

I would like to see maybe for bigger areas to cover instead of doing multiple missions to cover the area have a resume mission after you swap the battery.

Already there: Restart app and when you get to the mission planning screen, wait a few seconds then click arrow on right side. This will scroll through previous missions. Choose the one you want and click continue.

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Ability to change direction of flight and change start point (Posted in Rotate Flight Paths thread)
Extend Mission option
Show linked images on Ortho / 3D when clicking on a point & allow zoom (see Ability to assist matching points thread)
Curved flight paths (to efficiently follow curved terrain - e.g. valley mapping)
Re-fly mission at different altitude / with different camera
Terrain following (in another thread)
Videogrammetry (It’s a wish list, isn’t it?)

For reference to those with DJI Inspire wanting to see the image as you fly - if you have a dual controller setup you can just run DJI app on the second controller and view the imagery. We also use this for oblique runs and for additional status output (battery etc). If you use the HDMI out on the master controller you’ll also get most of this (with OSD on).

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I’ll post all my requests in one post. At least one has already been requested.

A: Expand Map Borders:

Issue:

I fly small vineyards on hilly terrain bordered by very tall trees. Though the Inspire seems to fly very accurately under DroneDeploy’s control, I still pull the borders in from the edges of the vineyard to ensure the Inspire doesn’t crash into the trees. Your mapping software limits its results to the defined flight polygon instead of everything the camera sees. MapsMadeEasy does not do this and produces maps with borders far beyond the defined flight polygon. However their NDVI processing is much inferior to yours and they have little patience assist those using “hacked” cameras such as mine. (BTW, MME’s flight control software is completely inadequate to my flying environment.)

Request:

Can you process all imagery captured by the camera? That way I could use your superior eNDVI processing while keeping the Inspire a safe distance from trees. It would be a great solution for me.

B: Allow Mission Planning in Android with craft off.

Issue:

I fly in remote areas with no PC and must create missions using the Android device. The requirement to have the Inspire on and have GPS lock uses precious battery time as those planning sessions can be quite lengthy with lots of foot travel to scope out the situation.

Request:

Allow mission planning on the Android tablet with no Internet connection and no connection to the Inspire.

C. Provide Speed Option to and from Missions

Issue:

This is again an issue in my flying environment with tall trees and hilly terrain. I fly these missions with my finger on the Flight Mode switch to kill the mission if the Inspire heads into the trees. The Inspire flies to the mission start so fast I have no reaction time to judge whether it’s going to come to its screeching halt in time or mistakenly cover that last 20 feet into the trees. While it’s good not to waste time in transit to and from a mission, could you at least have it gradually slow down at the end so I can more readily judge if it’s on target?

Request:

Provide a “to/from mission” speed adjustment or ramp the speed down as it approaches the mission start.

D. Allow Manual Orientation of the Flight Grid

Issue:

I often must fly in windy conditions. The Inspire handles wind surprisingly well, but it’s ideal if it can face its nose or tail directly into the wind. Its frontal area is very small while its sides provide a small wall to the wind. It would also be nice if it could remain oriented to the wind during its turns, flying forward in one run and backward on the next. The Inspire has no problem flying backward.

Request:

Allow manual orientation of flight grid, ideally including an option to maintain wind orientation through turns.

2 Likes

Thanks for these feature requests. I’ll add them to our prioritization list. Some of them are already on the roadmap.

Regarding the cropping. Have you tried adjusting the cropped area once the map had been made on our data page on dronedeploy.com? If this doesn’t work I think it probably could with some small changes on our end. I’ll bring this up to the team.

Having the app calculate the resolution would-be helpful. I believe all the necessary data is currently compiled. Just needs to be calculated.

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Thanks for the great job so far! I can’t wait to see more so, here is my wish list.

Things others have wished for that I like:

•Allow Manual Orientation of the Flight Grid and change start point
•Extend Mission option
•Terrain following
•Videogrammetry (It’s a wish list, isn’t it?) @rogerpearson
•have the drone just change direction instead turning the drone in the direction of travel
•The ability to plan the mission without having to connect to the drone to save battery

[quote=“chasemgray, post:7, topic:288”]
We are working on the ability to plan using the desktop which will allow you to plan ahead of time. Following that we will have full offline planning with no internet or drone required.
[/quote] I would like to do it from the app on site. My plans seem to change often and I would like to do some planning from the app on site without using the battery. Sometimes the “desktop scout” I do to preplan a flight does not reveal the current state of affairs on site. I also may have more time to shoot than I thought and will want to test a different altitude or adjacent site.
• The flight plan does not need to be calculated until the area perimeter is set.
•Instead of the app making the box I would like to be able to touch the corners off the area I want to cover.
•Having the app calculate the resolution

Wishes I didn’t see:

•Dashboard:

  • File organization. I think it would be helpful to be able to use a conventional filing method with folders and color markers.
  • I would also like the missions to have an option to be aligned as a grid or tiles instead of long edge to edge strips for ease of reading.
  • I think the missions should have a thumbnail of the actual mission and not the base map pic.
  • More vital information could be accessed from these tiles without opening the mission, I imagine more like Netflix or Amazon hover functionality.
  • It would be nice to be able to chat with help and view projects while uploading without having to open another page.
  • as more projects are added you have more pages and can select them at the bottom of the page by clicking on the page number you want to go to. It would be nice to back out of a project to the page you selected and not be brought back to the front page. ex. I click on page 3 and select a project. Ooops wrong project, I back out and am taken to page 1. It would be more efficient if I had backed out to page 3.
    •It would be nice if DD could make note of the file numbers for pics of certain flights and let you know if you are uploading the proper pics for that flight. If you could name the mission on site and a reference to that flight was added to the file name or something of that nature. When I upload photos to the mission from the dashboard it is hard to tell if I am on the right “smart survey” or “smart survey (copy)(copy).” Possibly just an info txt file could be generated and saved before and after the mission on the sd card as a “Slate”.

I really appreciate the opportunity to participate in the development of this amazing tool. Thanks again for all the hard work.

Anthony

One big feature want would be to just select orthomosaic. The ability to chip out a 2D map is huge in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, Really love the DSM, NDVI, and 3D model too but for fast cloud processing would like the chance to pass on NDVI and 3D.

  • Question: can you help me find a way to convert the DSM with orthomosaic to create a Digital Terrain Elevation Data .dt2 file? A lot of my uses would benefit a lot of associating the high resolution DSM within the imagery to know 5m or less post spacing i.e. Have much higher quality than SRTM2 data that is available to public.

  • Video mosaics, curious how one would do that without the proper metadata on platforms like the DJI. My gut tells me the raw video DJI takes does not take EXIF on every frame, though could be wrong.

  • Would be nice to create a .gpx or .kml route and use that to plan a flight pattern. For example I drive a grid I’d like to map and hit stop when I’ve completed the area then fine adjust it mobile or at a desktop.

  • The ability to work with dronedeploy to create ownship private server to work for particular customer sets that may want the ability to batch process but not share map data with world? Is that a service offering? Or ability to leverage ownship CPU/GPU cores and work with your software, guess that’s a license method??

  • Overall, very pleased with the interface!! Compared to many other GIS tools the basics of drag and drop files and you all provide a product is better than anything I’ve seen from Digital Globe, ArcGIS, or NGA products. Keep up the awesome work!

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