MicroPilot 3rd Party Flight Planning Tool

MicroPilot Users

 

There is some great news. The new owners of Lentsika have informed me that the new version of the product is now ready for sale.


http://www.lentsika.ceped.it

 

I have had the opportunity to demo the software and there are some great improvements over the older version.


  1. These include but are not limited to:  
  2. The ability to “zoom” large maps
  3. Support for absolute coordinates (previous version only had relative) You can now plan your flights and change the take off point in the field without it effecting the flight grid.
  4. The ability to have a “Via” waypoint which the plane flies to before entering the grid.
  5. The ability to set a landing location different from the take off location.

All in all the new software is a great tool and definitely an improvement over flight planning using Horizon alone.  I have also been told that this is just the start and we can look forward to some post flight image analysis features in the future as well as some additional functionality in the flight planning mode.

 

Bottom line in my opinion it is well worth the money.

 


Yours Sincerely


Rory


 


 

Tags: Horizon, MicroPilot, micropilot.ning.com

Views: 242

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Replies to This Discussion


DeveloperPermalink Reply by Mark Colwell on March 10, 2010 at 10:28am
For 350 Euro's it has to great, any chance to covert to Open Source for use DIY folks soon?
Permalink Reply by Rory Paul on March 10, 2010 at 10:41am
Mark

I have expressed this to the developer that it would be in their interest to open this to AttoPilot and ArduPilot users i.e. generate flight plans that can be used by those autopilot. I doubt that it will be made available as "open source".

With regards to price yes you are correct that by DIY standard it is not cheap however MicroPilot's current software is not designed for planning flights for aerial photography and with this application you reduce the amount of time need to calculate all the parameters to achieve a successful flight to seconds. You can even watch a flight in progress and adjust and transmit a new pattern to compensate for wind direction in almost real time.
Permalink Reply by Peter Verwoerd on March 10, 2010 at 7:53pm
Hi Rory,

Thanks for the news. I'm very interested in the Micropilot technology so it's great to hear they finally released some decent flight planning software. I've downloaded the demo, but I have my doubts about how accurate the spatial resolution is calculated.

In the camera settings there are no parameters in place for focal length and physical size of the sensor, and aren't these some vital parts of information in order to calculate spatial resolution or overall ground coverage of 1 photo? If indeed the photo representations are calculated wrong, who can guarantee a decent overlap?

Thanks,
Permalink Reply by Rory Paul on March 10, 2010 at 10:35pm
Peter

Just for clarity the software is 3rd party it is not produced by MicroPilot it was produced by a CropCam user and acquired for further commercial development by CEPED.

With regards to how they calculate the overlap I will have to refer you to them for an accurate answer as I am not intimate with the inner workings of the application.

Personally I have been using the older application for about 18 months without any issues with regards to overlap as long as you took into account you needed to increase overlap as wind speed increased. Rotating the the flight path into the wind also improved results as crabbing was reduced.

There are other issues like missing images (due to blur or camera failure to trigger, yes it happens) that they have tried to solve by running the flight route twice for example.


Regards

Rory

ModeratorPermalink Reply by Gary Mortimer on March 11, 2010 at 12:06am
That into wind tip from Rory applies whatever platform you are using, its a good tip!

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