Lateral overlap when flying perpendicular to main path

DXIngenieria

Hi,

Let's say I am flying with 70/30 overlaps on a solar farm. But I am not flying with the drone aligned with the path but perpendicular to it. Then, the 30% side overlap becomes a much lower overlap in real life as the sensor is narrower (512 pixels instead of 640 pixels). To get a real side overlap of 30% I must include my flight plan overlap to 48% or so. Could dronelink take into account the real orientation of the drone while flying to calculate the real overlap?

Thanks in advance!

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Comments

14 comments

  • Comment author
    Jim McAndrew Dronelink Staff
    • Edited

    You can select the Solar Inspection template when you create your mission, and you will see it automatically sets Drone Heading to Right on the map component. When Left or Right is selected, the overlaps are calculated correctly as you will see.

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  • Comment author
    DXIngenieria

    Thanks, Jim but even when using the Solar inspection template I am getting a weird effect that draws left and right unusable. Look at the image: green turns are performed as expected (pointing north) while the yellow ones don't. The drone turns and so does the gimbal

    I am also attaching the mission just in case:

    https://app.dronelink.com/dxingenieria/my-first-project/plan/SlSlNDFHaO9eUscTfcZL/Ub1CdsDv8GbBiymebjqs

     

     

     

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  • Comment author
    Jim McAndrew Dronelink Staff

    Moving this to bug reports and we will investigate.

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  • Comment author
    DXIngenieria

    Thanks a lot!

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  • Comment author
    Mike (Arizona Wyldwest) Dronelink Expert Dronelink Expert
    • Edited

    Not sure why or if it helps. I checked the plan and noticed it is set to Terrain Follow. That’s fine but I thought I’d just try changing reference to ATL and it looks correct in mission preview. Looking at 3D view with both AGL. and ATL the AGL setting shows a slight increase of altitude at just the very end of each leg only. Also noticed if keeping it AGL and just changing capture priority to distance it looks correct. Maybe it will help narrow it down, maybe not. 

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  • Comment author
    DXIngenieria

    Thank you, Mike, but I do need Terrain Following as the terrain is hilly and need to keep a distance of 23 meters to panels. Probably not in that flight plan but the site is plaged with hills anywhere so I just enable it by default. Don't know why but whenever you create a solar mission and modify its boundary points it starts to behave oddly with strange flips on turns, losing the crab-like movement (keeping the heading fixed at all times). Also, overlaps are only calculated correctly when you set right or left to yaw in reference to the path. If you set, for example, 270 degrees, overlap is not well calculated.

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  • Comment author
    Mike (Arizona Wyldwest) Dronelink Expert Dronelink Expert

    Ok. I understand why you want AGL but looking at the terrain it’s looks relatively flat. I’m sure Jim will look into. Just switching to distance capture may work if for some reason it is not working as you have it set. You can just copy that plan and make changes to see if it works for you without changing the orignal. Just some suggestions. 👍🏼

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  • Comment author
    DXIngenieria

    It is funny because I was indeed using distance capture and it was missing photos so I will check tomorrow with time capture. Thanks a lot for your suggestions!

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  • Comment author
    Mike (Arizona Wyldwest) Dronelink Expert Dronelink Expert
    • Edited

    I did look at the plan you shared again and it was set to 2 second intervals not the 1 seconds you wanted. Not sure if you realized that so you may want to look. Also you can check that mission you flew which you said was missing captures and see how many were taken and where. Sending a link in how to check flown missions. As you can see in one of mine it list each photos info to include the time interval and where they were taken. This may help to set up the plan a bit different to accomplish what you need. Hope it helps.  

    https://support.dronelink.com/hc/en-us/articles/10141763310611-Flight-Management-Portal-Mission-History-Reviewing-a-Successfully-Completed-Mission-in-the-Web-App

     

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  • Comment author
    DXIngenieria

    Oh, that tool is grear, thank a lot, Mike! It would be totally perfect if it could auto-refresh :-). I will submit it as a proposal.

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  • Comment author
    Jim McAndrew Dronelink Staff

    After further investigation, it appears that the flight controller is cutting off the ramp-out, transition, and ramp-in because it is having to perform an altitude change between the segments (due to the terrain follow). Since the altitude change is a straight up/down motion, it has to bring the drone to a complete stop to do it so decides to just cut off the ramps. This is probably due to the fact that Distance capture priority is the default, which doesn't have ramps in the first place, so it wasn't found during testing during the original development of the feature (terrain follow in maps). Having said that, even in these cases the drone returns to the correct orientation by the time it reaches the next segment, so how does this really affect the data capture to the point you can't use this setting (Left or Right drone heading)?

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  • Comment author
    DXIngenieria

    Thanks a lot, Jim,

    For some flights we do use distance capture but we were recommended to set time capture to reduce the chances of missing images (though it does not avoid it either). The idea was that we need all our photos pointing north (or whatever angle we choose) and in solar inspection it does not stop taking photos during turns which causes a bit of conflict with the analysis software. So when the drone was doing those weird turns (it turns 180 degrees back and forth to position for the next row) I supposed this was unexpected behaviour. Hope this clarifies..

    Thanks again!

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  • Comment author
    Jim McAndrew Dronelink Staff

    The drone points in the direction of flight on longer traversals or when changing altitude so as to allow you to see where it is going and to be able to take over if it is going to run into something. In this case, it might be doing that a bit too aggressively in your eyes, but it is trying to be safe and this is by design so the recommendation is to use these settings for your use case.

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  • Comment author
    Nicolas Roberts Dronelink Staff

    Hey DXIngenieria, the behavior you are experiencing with the map turns has been fixed and will be realized in the next release. The drone no longer cuts off the turns when increasing altitude and it stays at the correct orientation. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

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