Hi
I am new to mapping and DD. I have only done small area up to 50 ha with my P4P in Namibia and South Africa.
I have been asked to help a npo which operates in Congo to locate optimal sites for rhino breeding.
The challenge is to fly the drone to cover about 1000 ha at a time, where there is absolutely no roads. The topo is pretty flat and all they want to see on the hires imagery if there is no risks for rhino such as mud pool, high river banks…
I was thinking flying a bit higher (150-180 m) than usual to get 5cm/px resolution (I usually flew at about 100 m or less). In that case I will only get 3000 images and use “only” 10 batteries to cover 1000 ha. This might take up to 3-4 days depending on weather conditions.
My first big worry is that there will be no wifi, neither cell coverage where I am going to fly… and last time I flew for a new lodge in the bush in northern namibia, DD did not want to start because of no internet although the fly plan was prepared and saved for offline use… so I had to drive back 120 km and as soon as DD picked up internet, everything went back to normal and I could fly again in the no network area.
My second big worry is how to process so many images… From Namibia it is totally out of the question to use online service, so the only option is to use a dedicated software on my mac. The problem is the processing time. With Pixel4DMapper it takes so much time (16 h for about 500 images on a MBP i7 2.5 Ghz!
I would appreciate any suggestions.
Paul
It is best to have the app open and signed in when you leave wifi so you don’t need wifi to sign in. I would put it in airplane mode before you left wifi to make sure the (or a sample) plan works. It is best to also leave it on until you get back to wifi so your finished map can connect and load to the cloud.
Flying as high as possible with about 70/70 overlaps should work for flat terrain like that. That will minimize the amount of pictures.
Drone Deploy only processes through the cloud so you would have to find a way to upload them. You could try our Turbo upload. https://support.dronedeploy.com/docs/how-to-process-datasets#section-steps-for-uploading
Thank you Gary
Flying as high as possible… 300m 6 batteries res 9 cm/px 1000 images/1000ha or 170 m 9 batteries 5 cm/px 2800 images/1000ha?
I will definitely test you advice regarding network & non network zone as the place to survey is about 200 km from any (bad) internet access point (DRC)!
Uploading 20-60 GB at 0.2 Mbps… I am afraid that is not an option!
Paul
Are you concerned with high accuracy on the topo? Less than 10cm? If not fly to the maximum legal limit and bring your overlaps down to 55%.