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Both Mission Planner and DroidPlanner have recently added features for simplifying aerial survey. These tools help take the guesswork out of mission planning with cameras onboard, taking pictures to be stitched into a mosaic. Rather than manually specifying a grid flight pattern, you can instead specify you camera, desired operational altitude, and triggering method. The survey tool takes care of the rest, and allows you to see the expected coverage as well as estimates of ground resolution, required number of pictures, and other statistics.

Survey is completely airframe independent and works for both copter and plane. By framing the mission planning problem in terms of aircraft operation and desired result, rather than the means to that result, planning is vastly simplified, repeatable, and easy to do in the field. 

Fly the camera, not the plane!

The current version of DroidPlanner now supports the following features in Survey:

• Simple user interface
• Multiple supported cameras
• Real-time visualization of the flight plan
• Projected camera footprint visualization
• Calculated statistics, such as coverage area and mission length

The current version of Mission Planner now supports the following features in Survey:

• Both simple and advanced user interfaces
• Multiple supported cameras and custom camera definition
• Automatic camera parameter identification by photo upload
• Real-time visualization of the flight plan
• Projected camera footprint visualization
• Calculated statistics, such as coverage area and mission length
• Trigger type selection and auto population of the distance-based trigger, CAM_TRIGG_DIST

This is the first of a series of posts explaining the end-to-end process of aerial survey, from planning to stitching.  The wiki will be updated with tutorials on 1) mission planning, 2) aircraft setup and operation, 3) camera control and 4) post-processing. And new features are always being added, so stay tuned!