Mission Planner by Michael Oborne is an impressive piece of software. It is used to program the open-source APM autopilot. The autopilot is used to control planes, copters and rovers. I have used Mission Planner a lot and I can not do without.

Some years ago I started making a map for the Mindland island in the archipelago of Norway using a GPS, OpenStreetMap and Bing aerial imagery. The main driver for this project was to document old place names. With the drones becoming somewhat of a hobby last year I thought it would be nice to also establish a proper open license ortophoto for the island. Mission planner has what it takes to approach such a task in a structured manner, save for one thing. The polygon tool only imports .poly-files.

When working with maps some of us tend to stick with shapefiles or geodatabases. I have made a small script which allows for the conversion of a shapefile with a geographic coordinate system (wgs84) to as many .poly files as there are objects in the shapefile. Adding the functionality to Mission Planner has been indicated as possible, but has yet to materialise. So until then the python-script associated with this posting remains relevant.

• Read more about this script and download it

The initial map shows how two .poly files from my generated grid (also called fishnet in the GIS term) can be used to do generate one mission. One could in also add more squares.

The below map shows the grids in shapefile format using a GIS program. Converting all these grids to .poly files posed a challenge. The script has solved it. Using the pyshp-library to enable Mission Planner to read shapefiles should be rather straightforward.

In an earlier discussion open formats was mentioned. It is a good idea, but all the time shapefiles area a de-facto standard for conservation work and more it represents a good start.

Drone flying in Norway has it's challenges. I bought an 3D Robotics Quadcopter in June. Parts of this summer holiday was spent getting through the practical side of flying - both using the stics and MissionPlanner. All in all great fun!

I wanted to learn more about how to take aerial photography. Rather straightforward until you learn that the national security agency wants to know when and what you will be photographing. So I had to send them an application which they expeditiously answered yes to.

The next step was to make sure I followed all air safety regulations and had the proper insurances. Fine - easy but a bit expensive.

And while I was at it I considered if the regulations motor based activities in wilderness areas could be an issue. I also learnt that flying with birds could be a problem in relation to the biodiversity act. Flying within some protected areas is also not allowed.

I wrote it all up in a rather lengthy Norwegian blog post which can be read using Google Translate. If you plan on bringing your quadcopter or similar to Norway it could be well worth reading up on the issues.

After completing my efforts I managed to take some great imagery. The imagery below was made using trial software from Pix4UAV. It is of the farm where I did my testing. It was made making a mosaic of several images. I then made an elevation model and ultimately did a hillshade analysis. The final hillshade was put on top of the imagery making increasing the depth experience for the viewer.

I will follow up with some posts on how to adopt aerial survey methods drones.