I'm a student researcher in my university's Geomatics program (geospatial engineering/surveying)

I've been tasked to build a UAV for basic aerial mapping use. My budget is about $1,000, so obviously professional grade UAVs from companies like Trimble or senseFly are well out of my reach.

That said, I've looked at a handful of Ready-to-fly UAVs from Team Blacksheep, 3DRobotics, Parrot and the techpod. These all seem wonderful, but a recent discussion between myself and a classmate has me wondering if I should go the ready-to-fly route or not. Obviously the cost and intended payload are a huge factor in this decision with what I'm looking to do.

Currently, I think I'm mostly looking at and leaning towards the 3DR Y6 frame kit w/ electronics. This seems to be a suitable frame for the payload of a camera, though the camera bit is where I'm a bit lost. While a go-pro makes sense for enthusiasts, it's wide angle nature means that there is distortion at the edge of photographs which won't do us any good. That said, it's payload will be a single camera. The classmate I previously mentioned suggested that some of the FPV kits would likely be suitable if we set them up at a proper angle. Given the flight restrictions in place, we can't do real photogrammetry (requires two cameras) and we won't really be able to fly at heights where a high mega-pixel camera would really be deemed necessary.


My questions at this point are the following:

What I will need in addition to the 3dr y6 kit with electronics (http://store.3drobotics.com/products/y6-copter-kit-1) to go about doing what I intend to do.

and..

What sort of camera (within budget) to go along with said above kit. Would an FPV kit be suitable or should I see about modding a small point&shoot?

and..

How much run-time might one expect from various capacity batteries; I don't know what our intended run time is, but some of the ready-to-fly UAVs listed incredibly short flight times. A half hour is likely what we will be aiming for with this first build we do.

Other thoughts:

From what I can gather, telemetry won't be a must since we will be using APM and have pre-programmed flights that won't really require two way communication or need a remote controller. However, I'm not opposed to a telemetry kit since it does offer an additional fail safe option for the drone. 

I apologize for my newness to the subject and the obvious lack of knowledge that may stem from my questions here; my hobbies have never been anything this cool and I was given a fairly short notice to produce a parts/price list so that we can purchase everything we need before the semester ends. I'm glad this community exist as I have a lot of reading to do here in my future. I'm also leaving this post as unassigned as far as category goes because I'm not really sure where it would be best to post this yet since it seems like it'd really fit in a few categories. My apologies if this is an issue!

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  • Your budget is very limited, I doubt you'll be able to build anything for that money, unless you have other stuff lying around (like transmitters, a computer, etc). The craft itself may be doable, but the electronics alone easily go up to $500. Add the frame and you're right in the $800 range, without tx, battery and spares.

    I'm confused about your message. You say it's for aerial mapping, but then you mention "FPV kits".

    A modded P&S is much better than a gopro. You can calibrate any camera of course, but any calibration does result in pixel stretching usually from the sides and corners towards the center. In this process you're losing a bit of information. The more significant the distortion, the more information is lost. The GoPro requires extreme pixel stretching and it's not likely to have good feature matching for reconstruction purposes.

    A P&S is cheaper and you get refurbished or used ones very easily.  The Canon ones are more popular since you can load the card with CHDK, which allows you to have finer control over exposure, focus lock and other features to speed up the process of taking shots. It also has a remote shutter to allow the AP to take pics at geo intervals.

    Most multirotors go between 8-15 minutes only. Check out ecosynth for long endurance ones (I built one of them). These can be built to go up to 38 mins or so, but the investment is much larger. Planes are the next option, but you should make sure you have a suitable terrain around that allows you to execute test flights.

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