I use my quadcopter to capture aerial video, purely for entertainment. I don't do surveying or structure scanning. I just like to film things and share the footage. Unfortunately winter time doesn't always yield the prettiest vistas in the southeast United States... the trees and grass are dormant and the sky is usually overcast. It's not all that visually appealing to me. So I've spent most of winter inside doing little things to get ready for pretty flying weather in the spring and summer.
Arducopter 3.2 introduced two excellent features for aerial videography – persistent ROI and Spline waypoints. I wanted to leverage those features in a new capability. I thought it would be cool if my quad could fly in a helical pattern as it ascended around tall structures. So I wrote a light weight Java program that automatically generates helical waypoint patterns based on my desired inputs (location, altitude, rotations, directions, angle offset, etc). Here is a video showing the helical flight pattern in action:
Here are screen shots showing the actual flight pattern (green) compared to the desired pattern (blue)
I realize that this isn’t exactly groundbreaking work compared to what goes into the flight management software, and it may or may not be useful to other pilots out there. But I have a friend who enjoyed the novelty and suggested that I share the project. The code is open source and is available from my Github account here https://github.com/kkanzelmeyer/HelixGenerator. The algorithm used to generate the waypoints should work anywhere on the globe.
If you are an experienced developer and you think this project is worth expanding I’d love to hear suggested improvements.
TL;DR – I wrote a program that generates helical waypoint patterns. Check out the video and pictures.
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