I am a student at OSU working on my degree in Civil Engineering and working with one of my ASCE club members and an advisor, to understand how to do UAV Aerial Surveying and Mapping. Our goal is to convince the advisory board to fund our project and hopefully be able to convince the sponsors and school officials how important it is to add aerial surveying courses to the curriculum for survey technology and civil engineering, in order to keep up with changes in technology in the industry.
So far myself and the other member I am working with decided to buy our own cheap drones since we are expected to put out results for this project, without having the funding yet for a drone for the school. I bought an Ehang Ghost Drone 2.0 VR, and the other member got a 3dr Solo. we are using Agisoft right now but have not figured out how to tie everything together to get coordinates so we can save the project data and transfer it into autocad civil 3d.
My question is, since I am new to the drone world, I do not like how the Ghost Drone operates off of a phone app. also, the waypoint feature only tells the drone where to go, unlike mission planner, there is not much I can get off of the ghost drone autonomous flight mode as far as flight data to use to sync my photos with. Can I change out to a new flight controller? for example Pixhawk? if so, how hard will it be, and if anyone has other input that would help us have a successful project, I would appreciate it.
Also, I have a smart battery for the ghost drone, is there any way I can use a (not so smart) battery? I am on my 2nd battery already in the last month and I followed all instructions to properly charge the battery, but for some reason my drone still says the battery is low and it returns upon take off even if the battery is at 90%. Hence the reason I want to switch out controllers as well.
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Thank you very much guys! I really appreciate your help with this.
For student, you can get a free educational license for aerial mapping with drone at http://www.3dsurvey.si/
At the same site, it has extensive tutorial collection, I don't know the Ghost drone, but your other member's Solo will do the job. Solo is an APM drone. For APM base quad, the recommended workflow is using mission planner to plan the mission, then use the software for the rest.
Hello! I have just posted this: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/integrating-low-cost-l1-l2-rtk-in...
That features a Thesis published on the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences featuring exactly the UAV integration for photogrammetry and I think it might help you.
Cheers!
Hi, You can do cartography with a Phantom 3 for small areas, in the case of phantom you can use apps like dronedeploy and other options, and then you can process them in agisoft you can generate DTM, DSM, and photomosaic; And also meshed in extensions DXF for civil 3d, for large extensions it is necessary to build a conventional aircraft and equip it with pixhawk, in this case the mission planner is used to program the mission, and the photos are geotagged with the help of mission planner Control + F, with SOLO of 3dr should be able to do the same since it is based on pix4.
The digital drone catography is an excellent tool for the civil engineer
If you have more doubts, you can let me know