Mapping with Ardupilot
I've been playing with ArduPlane for quite a while and have finally got to the point where I can make it do something useful. I've been inspired by others on this site to use it for aerial photography to make 3D maps and the like.
I have an ST Models Discovery as the airframe (awesome platform for Arduplane by the way) and have made my own camera mount out of plywood for the bottom. It has one servo for roll stabilisation using CHAN 8 on the autopilot to keep the camera pointing down. It's basic but works pretty well (see pics)
Last weekend I flew over a small island on the river near my house. I managed to get 155 photos in around 10 mins and produce quite a reasonable 3d surface using hypr3d. I gotta say that these guys rock with great personal service and it's all free! They did struggle a bit with that many photos, but you can see the result below
I'm not in the same league as some of the other makers of aerial maps on this site, and have no idea of the accuracy of this map, but was pretty happy with the early results and would like to work on this more to get better results.
my setup is
Airframe - ST Models Discovery Trainer with stock motor and 30A ESC
Arduplane 2.24 with Magnetometer, airspeed kit and xbee - a few lines of code added to output roll stabilisation
Home made camera mount with roll stabiliser
Canon IXUS 50 camera 5MP (this is a very light P&S camera) running CHDK
Spektrum DX 7 2.4GHz tx/rx
2200 mAh 3s motor battery + 1000 mAh 2s battery to power all other electronics via a UBEC (the stock BEC is too small)
I used Mark Willis's aerial coverage spreadsheet to calculate the waypoints before launch and it seemed to produce a good result.You can see the waypoint in the following screenshot
Cheers
James
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Developer Comment by Max Levine on November 1, 2011 at 2:07am -
It looks Grate !!! Well done !!! What did you use to trigger your camera ?
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Comment by James masterman on November 1, 2011 at 2:17am -
I just used the intervalometer script and fired it every 1 second, which gives more like every 4 seconds as the camera slow to write to its card. The extra waypoints on the lines above were an attempt to keep the plane flying as close to a straight line as possible, rather than trigger points for the camera.
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Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on November 1, 2011 at 2:40am -
Brilliant, well done
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Developer Comment by Michael Oborne on November 1, 2011 at 3:41am -
nice work james.
i have been thinking about adding a camera calc box into the planner for these type of calcs. I have started
https://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/source/browse/Tools/Ardupi...but marks spreadsheet looks good.
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Comment by Mark Willis on November 1, 2011 at 4:01am -
James, very well done! This is what a great many of us are aiming to do.
If you upgrade to the Canon A590, you'll be able to get about a shot every two seconds.
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Comment by James masterman on November 1, 2011 at 4:30am
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Thanks guys.
Mark - I'm thinking of upgrading, but I got the ixus 50 for $30 on ebay so it will do for now. It is also very light (200g including the mount) which gives longer flight times.
I've been meaning to ask - is the focal length box in your spreadsheet refering to '35mm' equivalent focal length, or just what the camera reports?
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Comment by James masterman on November 1, 2011 at 4:34am
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Mike, that would be a very useful feature in the planner. The spreadsheet is great but can be a bit teadious to get the waypoints in the right spot, since it has no map. If the planner let you click a start and end point (or drag out a box) and then calculated the path based on the camera params you give it, that would be great!
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Comment by robert bouwens on November 1, 2011 at 6:09am
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this looks really great!
huts off!!!
robert
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Comment by Martin Poller on November 1, 2011 at 6:14am -
Great results, I'm cribbing as much as I can, its the way I want to go too, I had missed much of the camera and waypoint coverage calculator posts and am very much playing catch up to all of you.
Would be very interested to learn how to trigger the camera at a waypoint rather than using the time interval setting on CHDK.
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Comment by Raytrace Nomad on November 1, 2011 at 8:06am -
Could anyone link to spreedsheet for aerial coverage ?
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