Discussions

Aerial Mapping

I'm trying to find some ideal solution for photogrammetric mapping terrain. I had some success with Mikrokopter, but is it far from ideal when we talk about mapping. It have some nice features in new firmware like drawing lines with given x and y distances, nice realtime position tracking by xbee and I have been able to manually fly along those lines. Main disadvantage is that it cannot cover larger areas at once, since it cannot stay in air long. So my next goal will be to go with airplanes or some wing type aircraft.
What confuse me is what type of telemetry would be nice for such purpose? I have studied APM and it's features. I saw it has grid feature on its ground station, but I don't know does it fly the plane along the line or it just guide plane trough waypoints. Also, would it be difficult to fly manually, just keeping plane on the line? Data transfer seems to me much slower (2Hz) than the one with mikrokopter even used with same devices (xbee). And what about triggering? Is there some way to automatically trigger servo for given time or ground distance?

Any help about this subject would be appreciated...