Boundary Identification

When marking the boundary, it is possible for your customer to provide you with a .kml or .kmz file. Some mission planning software programs allow the input of this file directly. If it can’t be input directly it takes a bit of time to transfer the boundary of the area of interest over to the mission planning software and mistakes can happen. If you are planning the mission from the office, it will take a little longer to find the correct spot than if you go out to the area of interest and plan from there. When you are at the site the location program on your phone or tablet will take you directly to the spot on the map as long as your mobile device has a hot spot or cell service to connect to the internet. If you did not download the maps ahead of time it will be necessary to get to the nearest Wi-Fi or use cell service if available.

Don’t use this as the border, but use it to plan where to put the border. You usually want to extend the border of the mission planner 20-50 meters beyond the hard border that the customer is requesting. This will get photos from slightly beyond the area of interest which greatly assists in the stitching process at the edges of the area of interest. This extra distance does not take a lot of extra flight time. It may also gather in extra features to assist in stitching such as roads or other unusual features. It also gets some obliques of the edges of the area of interest. As software’s improve the amount of area needed to fly past the area of interest will decrease. Your data processing software will give guidelines on this. If not, experience with your software will have to do.

Save the work for future use. Before each flight save the flight plan. Once the program is run and it does the job correctly then be sure that it is marked in such a way that you can find it again. You may be asked to photograph the area again in the future especially if you want to have construction progress photos. This will take photos the exact same way time and time again, so the stitching will be done the exact same way as well. This is great for the managers to monitor the progress. This is true for multi-rotors but not true for airplanes. Typically, the flight paths of airplanes are contingent on wind conditions, so you will be able to retain the border but not the flight path. Multi-rotors don’t care at all about wind direction. They will fly the same direction no matter what.

If your mission planning computer does not have a hot spot or any way of connecting to the internet, then you will not see Google Maps at the field unless you cache the maps from a Wi-Fi connection beforehand. You need to plan a mission before you go to the field so that the maps are cached in all the resolutions that you will need in the field. Some programs have the ability to cache maps at the press of a button. Some must cache maps by having you actually go to the area of interest in Google on your laptop, then zooming in and out. These maps are usually cached indefinitely until you physically clear the cache yourself.