Flying Mavic Pro 2 using DroneDeploy Corridor

Just to clarify, the way I understand the un FAA law is we can only fly over busy roadways with a drone weighing less than .55 lbs. My confusion is Drone Deploy does not support mapping with the Mavic mini. The Mavic Pro 2 is great at doing corridor mapping but by law it is not allowed on busy roadways. can anyone help me understand this?

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You are not allowed to follow over the lane but you are allowed to transect it or cross over briefly. With Corridor flight you need to set your overlaps so that you are flying on the outside of the roadway. You will not be able to fly down the middle if there is not a median. You normally don’t have to worry about that because if the right away is wide enough there will probably be a median otherwise flying each side of the right away works just fine. If it is a construction project the road probably has safety signs and there is not a lot of traffic so there’s really no harm in flying in that case. Remember it’s the traffic and not the road.

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Thanks Michael, hope you are doing well.

How would you handle the attached maps,

One is a full map of the clover leaf, the other id just the main road.

Thanks,

Mark Wheeler

Mw Drone Photography

mwdronephotography@gmail.com

314-398-2569

~WRD000.jpg

Unfortunately, that’s going to take a waiver and a specially certified UAS. :frowning:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F/part-107/subpart-D/section-107.145

Thanks for your reply, I believe I can legally take my drone to the center area of each of the four clover leaf’s, rise up in the air lets say 100 feet and take video or pictures of the surrounding area. As mentioned before by Michael, I think I can then fly to the middle of each clover and take video and pictures of the roadways since I would not be over any traffic or roadways when taking my pictures or videos. Do agree with this?

According to the new 4/21 regulation you should be able to run a flight at 45 degrees NE which never runs in line along traffic. This is on the edge of the loophole though so the alternative would be to do a couple of orbits at slightly different elevations and gimbal pitches. Then look at the open areas (I see 12) and do some obliques at about 45 and 25 degrees every 10 degrees yaw as if you were doing a pano at each of those areas. You should have 432 images from those positions.

As long as you can fly without being directly over a human…whether pushing a shopping cart or driving a vehicle…and the area isn’t a restricted zone, you can fly it.

“Roads” or “Roadways” are never mentioned in the rules, because they don’t matter…they aren’t human.

All that matters is that you aren’t flying directly over moving vehicles that contain humans. (I guess we can fly over RC vehicles to our heart’s content! :slight_smile: )

So when using corridor in drone deploy if I keep the green line (drone route) while planning the mission from being over the paved road (over the grass) I should be ok no matter how much traffic the road has.

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Exactly. Just change your sidelaps to be at 65% or above. Whatever gets you outside the roadway on both sides. 75-80% frontlap. That should get you 8-10 images per pixel.

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And if you need to cross the road inflight, just do it between cars. Point the camera -90 and you’ll see all kinds of gaps to fly thru (over)!

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Hi Michael, You have posted really a great and informative stuff in this forum. Can I know how do you manage drones for long roadmaps? Can I also known about this ZenaDrone new technology? Do you know about ZenaDrone technology?
Thanks
Jone

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Michael is correct, you can transit over a road, you can not be over, or hovering over moving vehicles. Even if you have a mavic mini, for it to operate over people (OOP) and moving vehicles it would need to have a prop guard/cage which would push it up over the .55 lb threshold thus no go.

Something that have done in past is setup two missions that run parallel two each other one on each side of a busy road without being over the road. Then you just time your transit or cross of the road when there is a gap in traffic. Worse case if it is a very busy freeway with narrow gap to transit, fly one mission from one side of road, the other from the other. And per Michael that sums it up “Remember it’s the traffic and not the road”…

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We use the corridor flight plan. Previous to that we used manual waypoint missions in Litchi. Most of the roads that we do are not very straight so having corridor flight is a must. When we get to very long roadways we fly the map in phases. Many times this matches the phasing plan of construction. Or we use the road stationing in the plans. This just helps keep the data down per map so that they can be used in very high resolution. If we need to combine them then we can do that in another program called QGIS.