I just wanted to share a mapping mission I ran last week with the E382 from Event 38 (my company) and processed with DroneMapper.com.
The reason these results are somewhat noteworthy is the amount of time it took to make this. I pulled up to the flying field, setup the plane in maybe 5 or 6 minutes. I hand launched the plane, flew around manually for exactly 5 minutes, taking 110 pictures in that time. Brought it in for a quick landing in some bushes then I packed up and went home. At home I uploaded the images straight to DroneMapper without even reviewing them. A few hours later, DM came back with really awesome results. All of this took just a few minutes of my time not counting the drive to and from the field.
My setup on the E382 is as follows:
- Skywalker 168cm Airframe
- APM 2.0 with ArduPlane 2.4
- 3DR Telemetry Radios 915MHz
- Canon Powershot SX230 HS with CHDK
The camera is really what made this so quick.. with built in GPS all the images are geotagged automatically as they're taken. This mission was actually done to see if it could keep a GPS lock for the entire flight which it did. Having the images geotagged and processing them with DroneMapper returns files that can be analyzed (as in the image above) for things like the elevation profile of any path, the length of a path, the area of a field and so on. There are nice tutorials on how to get started with that in the DroneMapper FAQ.
Measuring the length of a trail
Measuring the area of low lying vegetation
Extracting the coordinates of a point of interest
Comments
Hey Ken,
You'd better check out the CHDK site for more details on it. There's a command, I think it's just "Shutdown" or "shut_down" or somethign like that where the camera simply powers off and the lens retracts. It can't automatically turn back on once you do that but presumably you'd never want to do that anyway.
Can you provide some input on how your using cdhk to control the camera? How do you control the lens retraction? Thanks, Ken
Sure, it's best to go with a tried & true setup. Let me know if you need any pointers.
Thanks Diego, yes it's possible to use inside the plane but it depends what your plane is made of. Foam is not a problem but carbon fiber, for example, would block the GPS signal.
What lens do you have in that camera?
Richard, sometimes in that situation it helps to remove as many pictures as you can. With so many duplicates it looks like there must be at least a few pictures showing the same spot. It may also just be such a featureless landscape that there aren't many strong matching points to put pictures together so it can get confused more easily.
Yes I think continuous drive needs you to hold the shutter down. Some remotes may be able to do that but if you're using a remote you almost may as well tie it in with the autopilot. Also 1FPS is a little too high, I shoot about once ever 2.7 seconds flying about 12 m/s at 100-120m altitude and that gives a workable amount of overlap.
The D20 will be supported by CHDK http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/D20.. it's just a matter of how long the developers take to finish.
Seems fine, but it's always the same, it's better for mapping cameras with more megapixels
i havent tried it myself, but Canon has a new rugged point and shoot camera with GPS. Since its canon it might be able to use CHDK, http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/02/07/Canon_D20
http://pentax.ca/pdf/o_manuals/om_OPTIOWG2_e.pdf i think we need to hold trigger button for continuous shooting
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