After a few months of trial and error, I finally figure out the basic of aerial mapping. Blessed with good weather two days ago, I took out my Skywalker 1900, APM 2 equip with Canon S100 to a near by oil palm estate own by a friend. The Skywalker with my current param track extremely well even in strong cross wind condition.
The total flight time is about 30 minutes from take off to landing covering 320 Ha of land at 300 meter altitude. The cross line distance is 140 M and the camera CHDK set to release shuttle every three seconds.
One interested things I discover is the GPS location shown in the mission planner is about 160 m away from the google map.
From the total of 500 plus images taken, I trim down to 89 image and put it through Autopanogiga. ( mine is trial version so water marks appear ) and the result is quite promising. I'm new to this program so the image is all run by the program default settingwithout manual intervention. It may able to provide better result if I gain more knowledge with it.
My Skywalker is build base on much of the information @ http://conservationdrones.org/
For those of you who wish to view the original file, here is my dropbox link https://dl.dropbox.com/u/35844265/%5BGroup%201%5D-Sandajaya300M%20110_Sandajaya300M%20513-89%20images%20%282%29.jpg
Comments
If you have the New Skywalker, you can put the camera inside the fuselage some where under the canopy area. Depend on your camera, you may need to cut away some foam at the side to fit in the camera. Put the camera and the flight battery as front as possible to avoid adding dead weight in the nose for proper CG.
You can take shot every three seconds, That is almost the fastest you can get from a Canon with CHDK. I'll suggest you start with 200 meter, set cruise throttle to 40% which will result a ground speed of about 45 km/h in calm weather. Sidelaping (your word) for 200 meter altitude is 140 meter for Canon S100.
Mission Planner have an excellence tools to do all this, under flight planner/map tools/camera
The above map was flown with my old Skywalker which I cut off some section of the front part and install a simple plywood made camera mount. The camera is put right in front of the plane. If you still need a picture' I'll take one for you.
Excelent Work, I'm try to do the same, but with not good results.
Where do you put the Camera on the plane?, Could you post pictures of your plane?
For Good results I think I need a Formula:
-Shots every x Seconds
-Altitude
-Cruise Speed
-Distance of lines of flight (sidelaping)
Sorry for my English
I didn't use the geo tag function in MP. My Canon S100 is GPS enable, make life easier. I didn't try MS ICE cos I think It may not good in handle large images file. Agisolf should able to get the job done. Unfortunately my hard ware is far from the ideal requirement and it is also quite costly. At this moment I'll try dronemapper for orthosaic and DEM
@Keeyen, great Job! Did you try to use the Mission Planner to Geo-Tag your photos after the flight?
If you want to process the data with digital photogrammetry approach, use agisoft. I have tried many times, and the results were good.
Nice Keeyen, look at Microsoft ICE. It's a free and extremely easy to use panorama maker.
Interesting.. yeah that is good to know.
I've set manual focus to infinity. some blur parts may due to the vibration of the plane. But i do discover that too many overlapping image will not made a better pano with APG
wow that is very promising.. is the out of focus parts because of the camera, something to do with the stitching or vibrations from the plane? Very awesome so far.