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)

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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

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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

 

3689430961?profile=original

 

 

Cheers

James

 

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Comments

  • Great!! Very impressive.

     

    Does Hypr3D provide you with score/correlation channels? And what gridding of the point cloud do you achieve with your setup?

     

    Tormod

  • Very good job!

  • Hi James,

    very impressive! That's exactly what I want to do with my equipment (EasyGlider, Ixus, APM).

    How did you realize the camera stabilizing? Because I've no experience in programming I would be happy to get the code you used.

    Frank

  • Have you looked this? Then you can use free RC channel to launch camera.

    http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/how-i-made-a-chdk-launcher-to-c...

  • hi sir Kunang, have you booted the chdk "os"  not the camera default onboard os?? you should see a diffferent minimalist menu if you're on the chdk enviroment

     

  • Hi Kunang, try hitting the 'alt' button on you camera and then menu to get the chdk menu up. From there you can go to the script menu and load the interval script. The button that does 'alt' will vary from camera to camera, but the chdk website should tell you. Mine is the little blue one at the bottom left of the camera back.

    For triggering, I am just tringgering using the script. I set it off manually before takeoff. You can trigger using arduplane if you have either a servo over the shutter button or some kind of IR trigger, but that seemed like overkill for my needs.
  • Hi James, I'm using Canon S95 and already uploaded the CHDK incl interval script into it but i could'nt find it in the camera menu. Also interested to know how do you trigger d camera via the mission planner.

     

  • Hey all, I just wanted to say "thank you" for your patience as we gear Hypr3D.com up to handle more traffic.  Special thanks to the several of you that wrote with thoughts, suggests and "server down!" notices!  That was all very helpful.  We've figured out most of the problems and have solved most of them.  We'll be knocking off the rest over the weekend.  Thanks again for your patience and interest, and keep the feedback coming! -Tom (Hypr3D.com)

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  • @Thomas.  Thanks for the heads up!  We just restarted the WebApp workers so it should be good again.  We've been tracking down a memory leak for a couple of days now in the Hypr3D webapp code that has been exacerbated by the (awesome!) increase in site traffic.  Thanks for using us and being patient with us...we're working to nail everything down and your input helps!  If there's any more trouble just send another note/comment and we'll address ASAP.

    -Tom (Hypr3D.com)

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    澳洲幸运10APP下载丨专注于彩票的安全购彩平台,澳洲幸运10APP下载丨专注于彩票的安全购彩平台【网址 XG333.COM-XP】业界最高赔率1.999,定位9.99]澳洲幸运10APP下载丨专注于彩票的安全购彩平台网站经验和技巧。百胜彩票整合算法,33彩票怎么样才能赢到钱,粤海彩票怎È
  • Being able to download a point cloud or mesh easily is a real game winner for hypr3D...on the other hand, the application server has been down all morning, so I havent been able to upload photos!  

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