sUAS Flight Planning Systems for Surveying

Today, in just a few short years software development has improved significantly, and more and more software companies are jumping into the fray. This is great for consumers because the prices are reasonable – some being free. Also, the software is very reliable and easy to use. Flight planning usually takes all of 2 minutes once you are familiar with the program. There are many teaching aids for those do it yourselfers, or there are academies, universities, and other learning institutes ready to assist.

To create a mission, you simply draw a box around the area on Google maps, set the resolution/altitude, and the software creates the rest. Press a button, the aircraft takes off, runs it mission, and returns to home. If the battery runs low during the flight, the aircraft knows how far away from home it is, leaves in plenty of time and lands. You change the battery and send it off again.

There are a few tweaks that you can perform to make the mission a little faster or a little safer, but as long as you follow the instructions from the data processing company or through experience, it will be pretty quick to get into the air.

There are many softwares on the market today which perform flight planning. Some, like DroneDeploy, Pix4D, SenseFly, and PrecisionHawk for instance all have flight planning systems which work seamlessly with their data processing software. It is possible to use flight planning software from one company and data processing software from another company. For instance, some aircraft use Pixhawk as an autopilot but instead of using Site Scan they may opt for Data Mapper or AgPixel. If you do this then you need to perform several test plots to make sure that it works well in all conditions.