Using Two Drones with One Mission

Hello All,

Has anyone tried using two drones to fly an NDVI mission? By that I mean when needing to fly a two-sortie mission, one RGB and one NIR/R, instead of landing and swapping camera modules, has anyone just brought two drones with them and flown one after the other — Drone 1 with the stock RGB lens and Drone 2 with the modified lens? Does DroneDeploy support switching aircraft, so long as the DJI Go app is connected to a drone, or do you have to keep the same airship throughout?

Thanks for your help.

If you waited until it said image capture started you could dosconnect and fly a second drone fine.

Being more familiar with the code engineering than a Regular Joe customer, do you think a workflow that includes two different drones for RGB and NIR/R is more or less time-efficient and/or practical than a workflow that uses one drone with two different cameras?

It might save your some time. As long as you’re careful to avoid any mid air collisions :wink:
I think aside from your setup time you’d probably be running mostly in parallel.

Technically it is possible, but there are a whole load of regulatory and safety issues to contend with. If you are using two drones you probably need two pilots and therefore lose any financial benefit from the increased speed. (I’m not aware of being allowed to operate swarms commercially anywhere) In this case you can just copy the mission and fly two completely separate missions, as you would back-to-back. Is airtime really a bottleneck, though? Most (commercial operator) time is spent in planning, setup, post flight, processing and not in the air. (Your question being about workflow). If the issue was the area being mapped you’d probably be up against BVLOS issues, too. So, to answer your question, I believe from a financial and regulatory perspective it is not currently viable. Probably better off hiring a guy in a Cessna.

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