Mapping with Ardupilot

I've been playing with ArduPlane for quite a while and have finally got to the point where I can make it do something useful. I've been inspired by others on this site to use it for aerial photography to make 3D maps and the like.

I have an ST Models Discovery as the airframe (awesome platform for Arduplane by the way) and have made my own camera mount out of plywood for the bottom. It has one servo for roll stabilisation using CHAN 8 on the autopilot to keep the camera pointing down. It's basic but works pretty well (see pics)

Last weekend I flew over a small island on the river near my house. I managed to get 155 photos in around 10 mins and produce quite a reasonable 3d surface using hypr3d. I gotta say that these guys rock with great personal service and it's all free! They did struggle a bit with that many photos, but you can see the result below

3D Rotatable version

I'm not in the same league as some of the other makers of aerial maps on this site, and have no idea of the accuracy of this map, but was pretty happy with the early results and would like to work on this more to get better results.

my setup is

Airframe - ST Models Discovery Trainer with stock motor and 30A ESC

Arduplane 2.24 with Magnetometer, airspeed kit and xbee - a few lines of code added to output roll stabilisation

Home made camera mount with roll stabiliser

Canon IXUS 50 camera 5MP (this is a very light P&S camera) running CHDK

Spektrum DX 7 2.4GHz tx/rx

2200 mAh 3s motor battery + 1000 mAh 2s battery to power all other electronics via a UBEC (the stock BEC is too small)

I used Mark Willis's aerial coverage spreadsheet to calculate the waypoints before launch and it seemed to produce a good result.You can see the waypoint in the following screenshot

Cheers

James

@Edson - the WP spreadsheet is pretty straightforward to use.

1. First go to the LatLong vs Distance tab and enter your location coordinates in the yellow cells at cells B25-B27.

2. Then go back to the Waypoint Calculator tab and fill out your camera details in the yellow cells E4-E11. Then enter your flying height in cells C6.

3. Copy cells c31 and c32 from the LatLong vs Distance tab into cells C16/C17 on the Waypoint Calculator tab.

4.Enter the flight start and end points in cells C29/C32. You need to play around with these to get the right coverage. Also play around with the overlap and orientation in cells C18-C21. You can see the flightpath in the graph.

5.The spreadsheet will calculate waypoints in cells G18-G200. I formatted the cells to produce the same output as the .h files that you get when you save waypoints in the mission planner (eg. "{WAYPOINT,0,150,-31.945158,115.918711}," .

6. Then I copied the cells to a .h file and opened in mission planner.

However, you can probably ignore 90% of this if you use the grid function in the mission planner. I didn't discover this feature until Michael pointed it out! All you really need to do is up to step 3. After that, just read off the flightline spacing (cell C26) and enter into mission planner when it when it asks for the grid spacing.

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Comments

Edson Nobrega November 3, 2011 at 7:46am

@James Thank you for the explanation James.
I did not know the grid function in the mission planner. Now, after your explanation I realized that the spreadsheet is fairly simple to use.
James masterman November 3, 2011 at 6:14am

Awesome. I haven't downloaded .89 yet, I'll take a look.
I.S. November 3, 2011 at 6:11am

@James There is a "Camera" button in.89 version!
so all the steps can be done now with the APM Planner?
James masterman November 3, 2011 at 6:08am

@Edson - the WP spreadsheet is pretty straightforward to use.

1. First go to the LatLong vs Distance tab and enter your location coordinates in the yellow cells at cells B25-B27.

2. Then go back to the Waypoint Calculator tab and fill out your camera details in the yellow cells E4-E11. Then enter your flying height in cells C6.

3. Copy cells c31 and c32 from the LatLong vs Distance tab into cells C16/C17 on the Waypoint Calculator tab.

4.Enter the flight start and end points in cells C29/C32. You need to play around with these to get the right coverage. Also play around with the overlap and orientation in cells C18-C21. You can see the flightpath in the graph.

5.The spreadsheet will calculate waypoints in cells G18-G200. I formatted the cells to produce the same output as the .h files that you get when you save waypoints in the mission planner (eg. "{WAYPOINT,0,150,-31.945158,115.918711}," .

6. Then I copied the cells to a .h file and opened in mission planner.

However, you can probably ignore 90% of this if you use the grid function in the mission planner. I didn't discover this feature until Michael pointed it out! All you really need to do is up to step 3. After that, just read off the flightline spacing (cell C26) and enter into mission planner when it when it asks for the grid spacing.
I.S. November 3, 2011 at 2:47am

@Oborne: I've been experimenting with grid and I really like it.

It would be even grater if the polygon wouldn't erase until manual "Clear polygon", so several grid options could be tested without redoing the polygon each time.

And it would be nice too if when clicking polygon we will enter in a polygon drawing mode, so we can select draw polygon and just do all the clics of the perimeter all together without doing right click->Grid->Add polygon point
for each point.

Thanks for this already great GCS, appreciate all the effort.
I.S. November 2, 2011 at 7:18am

@Michael Oborne: I didn't know that grid option thing. Awesome
Moderator

Gary Mortimer November 2, 2011 at 5:56am

@Mike that made me download the GCS right away and consider joining the Ardu clan! I will watch out.
Gustav Kuhn November 2, 2011 at 5:42am

The cowl is not easy to remove so it's hard to tell what is in there

Tell me....

I bent the motor mount, after my plane flew into a hill on auto, you need to cut the nose sticker, then gently pry away one side first.

Afterwards, just stick some pvc tape over the joint.

( Didn't visually track the plane during the incident, so I used the log file to find the last point of data, then drove around the area 'till I picked up the xbee signal again, got a google earth picture of it's exact position :-))
James masterman November 2, 2011 at 3:31am

Thanks Michael, the grid function appears to do nearly everything I need for setting up waypoints for aerial photography runs. The only addition needed is to calculate grid spacing based on camera parameters.

@Gustav - thanks for the tip, I didn't realise there were weights in the nose. The cowl is not easy to remove so it's hard to tell what is in there!
Developer

Michael Oborne November 2, 2011 at 2:52am

have you guys used the grid funtion in the planner? this is what its there for.

in flight planner
right click goto grid > add polygon point

repeat above untill you have your surround, allow extra.

next click grid

specify your flying alt.

specify the distance between lines , eg in picture above i would use 172 which has 30 % side overlap

the next part is to fire the camera at 73m intervals, or via time delay... etc etc.

i know personaly i use the relay on a constant 4 second timer.

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