Planning "multiple battery" missions?

I have been doing mapping missions with APM and Pixhawk for a while. I often want to map areas that are too large to cover in one flight (as I am sure do many people). I end up planning multiple missions and eyeballing the overlap between each mission even though I can use Mission Planner or DroidPlanner to do a very good automatic construction of the transects within each mission.

What I would really like to do is be able to pick a large survey area and have my ground control station calculate not only the appropriate waypoints to cover the area but ALSO break those waypoints up into mission lengths that my battery/aircraft combo can achieve. Im not always up to date on all the different developments for APM/Pixhawk. Is there currently any way of doing this in Mission Planner or some other GCS?

In Drone Deploy they are calling this feature "Multiple Battery missions":

http://support.dronedeploy.com/docs/flying-a-larger-area-with-multiple-batteries

My apologies if I am asking this in the wrong place. Any info on any similar functionality for Pixhawk would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi Chad

this is a problem we've had for a while, we use Mission Planner. Previously, we had to save multiple versions of a mission and manually guess at waypoints to break it up. We'd keep an extra flightline of overlap to make sure. This was tricky, as, as you delete waypoints (depending on which end you have to start from) the waypoint number automatically changes.

I think a few weeks or so ago, an update in MP allows you to break it up into segements! Just set polygon to your full area, see the time it would fly for, choose an appropriate number of segments. In the waypoint list, it will put in extra take offs and landings where you need them, still saves one file, but you can much more easily save x number of copies and modify them.

Now in the update I just did today (this may have been available for a little while), they have added a CTRL+O option in Survey (grid) so that you can open previously saved missions. This allows you to repopen those mission segments to double check the flight time parameters, etc. Awesome!

Hope this helps.

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Adam Kilpatrick January 24, 2016 at 8:16pm

Hi Chad

this is a problem we've had for a while, we use Mission Planner. Previously, we had to save multiple versions of a mission and manually guess at waypoints to break it up. We'd keep an extra flightline of overlap to make sure. This was tricky, as, as you delete waypoints (depending on which end you have to start from) the waypoint number automatically changes.

I think a few weeks or so ago, an update in MP allows you to break it up into segements! Just set polygon to your full area, see the time it would fly for, choose an appropriate number of segments. In the waypoint list, it will put in extra take offs and landings where you need them, still saves one file, but you can much more easily save x number of copies and modify them.

Now in the update I just did today (this may have been available for a little while), they have added a CTRL+O option in Survey (grid) so that you can open previously saved missions. This allows you to repopen those mission segments to double check the flight time parameters, etc. Awesome!

Hope this helps.
- Chad Hill > Adam Kilpatrick January 26, 2016 at 7:59pm
  
  Hi Adam,
  
  Thanks so much for the heads up about checking previous missions with ctrl+o. That sounds like it might be quite useful. Ill check it out.
  
  I still think it would be an important feature to be able to intentionally generate multiple discrete but related contiguous waypoint sets.
  
  -Chad

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Planning "multiple battery" missions?

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