Bandwagon's Drones Thread

I love these things. I can't wait until we have our own color 3d printer that can do 11x17 in the office.
PR45016 with Hillshade - 3D model by PBSusa (@PBSusa)

Vepil Tuco P Picasso3 @a_skeleton_03 - Do we have any ESRI pros on the forum that you're aware of?

I've never had so much trouble learning a piece of software. Feels like I can pick up anything else relatively quickly, including other GIS programs.

Just looking for some info on publishing raster/mosaic datasets via WMS or WMTS. Also, "Web App Builder for Desktop".

Please ping me if you stumble across someone here with a GIS background.

Some recent projects -

Vepil

Delta between field checkshots and UAS DSM. The point cloud hits much closer, -/+0.03' on this project, but the DSMs are ALWAYS consistently high. Kind of annoying, but easy to shift down.

This one looks good mainly because it's 3x as many photos as normally, over 3 low & slow flights. 2x crosshatch flights of obliques at 65d gimbal angle at 150ft, and 1x NADIR flight at 175ft. All at 10mph.

Comparing photogrammetry derived point cloud with lidar derived point cloud

They're both loaded up in both images. I'm going to do some cross section comparisons, just ran out of time yesterday

Playing around with some ideas in Esri's AGOL Scene builder. A little underwhelming right now. I'm hoping they add a lot more widgets and customization options like they're doing with the 2d maps.

http://pbs-env.maps.arcgis.com/apps/3DScene/index.html?appid=4a5d5a64807d482a8ba33bdd8870e84b

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I have a total newbie question on this. I recently read that the DJI Mavic Pro 2 is about to come out with a 5 mile range. I'm under the impression that you are not allowed to fly these things out of your own visual range. Is this true? Is it enforced? Do people follow this rule?

The reason I ask is that we have cattle/water tanks that are 3-4 miles away from the house but take driving 10-12 miles round trip on rough, 2-track roads to get to by ground, and they need to be checked regularly which adds up to a lot of time and wear and tear on vehicles. I would love to be able to fly a drone out to look at the water tank every morning. Would this be possible? Would it be legal? What would be the chances/consequences of getting caught, considering that I live in the middle of nowhere?

There are a lot of other applications I could imagine for this as well (locating wildfires would be a big one) but not being able to go out of visual range would make it a lot less useful.

BrutulTM
5 miles is unlikely in most situations, but possible I guess. Yes, it is against regulations. No, you'll likely not get caught.

Using something like a DJI Phantom 4 or a DJI Mavic, and "Litchi" for mission planning, you could plan an autonomous waypoint mission that will fly to each location and take a picture, then return to home.

You just need something that's able to continue mission after losing signal. 90% sure that the Phantom does this nowadays, but I never have a reason to try it. The older models couldn't store a mission on the drone, so you always had to maintain a signal.

Bandwagon said:

Using something like a DJI Phantom 4 or a DJI Mavic, and "Litchi" for mission planning, you could plan an autonomous waypoint mission that will fly to each location and take a picture, then return to home.

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In this case it could go outside of the controller range? That is exactly what I would like to do. I will have to look into this more.

Also, can you fly at night? And is there a way for the drone to take a waypoint? We were out until 4 in the morning last week trying to find a fire in rough country and even though we could spot the glow from a hilltop, we couldn't find a way to get there in the dark. Being able to send a drone out and get a lat/long back would have saved us hours.

BrutulTM said:

In this case it could go outside of the controller range? That is exactly what I would like to do. I will have to look into this more.

Also, can you fly at night? And is there a way for the drone to take a waypoint? We were out until 4 in the morning last week trying to find a fire in rough country and even though we could spot the glow from a hilltop, we couldn't find a way to get there in the dark. Being able to send a drone out and get a lat/long back would have saved us hours.

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I'm hesitant to give a concrete answer on that because I'm a little embarrassed that I don't know for certain on the new DJI drones (which I have 4 of). With some drones (like the Sensefly eBee, 3DR Solo or custom Pixhawk drones), it's absolutely possible (and still illegal) to send them beyond radio contact with a pre-loaded mission to capture images at certain locations, and then return home when done or when a battery failsafe triggers. They can all store large missions on their flight controller's SD card, and the flight controller or camera also handles the image capture and orientation.

With past DJI drones, all of that was done by the tablet and commands were sent to the drone for each waypoint as it progressed through the mission. I know that you could start a mission with a DJI Phantom 4 pro and have it fly to predetermined waypoints even beyond signal range, but I think that the gimbal orientation/direction will only change if it has signal. There's a couple workarounds though. Either way, I still think that a Phantom4 Pro is what you want and you'll get some use out of it, with a Mavic being a close 2nd.

No you are not permitted to fly at night without a waiver, which isn't easy to get. Also, there used to be a FLIR option for the Phantom, but I can't find it now. You may only be able to get thermal on the Inspire or M210/M600 now (which can also run the same missions). Where do you live?

This is what one of my waypoint missions looks like in Litchi. I have it set up to fly the perimeter of a landfill and stop at each waypoint to a. Point towards the POI with an elevation -2' below takeoff elevation, B. take a photo, C. return to launch point when complete. You can do multiple POIs (like at each watering tank), or you could just leave the gimbal pointed straight down and just have it capture a photo at every waypoint. If you send me a google earth KMZ file with thumbtacks at each location you need a photo, I could set up a sample mission and render a simulation video from google earth.

Thanks for the reply. If you don't mind, I will work on getting you that KML file. This is very interesting to me. I live in SE Montana.

BrutulTM said:

Thanks for the reply. If you don't mind, I will work on getting you that KML file. This is very interesting to me. I live in SE Montana.

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Sounds good.