Author: Silvia Franceschi - Andrea Antonello -
Contact name: Silvia Franceschi
Organization: HydroloGIS
Sectors:
Software:
Situation: During the last few years the increase availability of technology and the reduced costs of the instruments contributed to broaden the field of applications of drones for research and environmental applications.
Nowadays, drones are widely used to support technical operations and other new possibilities can be exploited depending on the availability of sensors.
Two important sectors where drones seem to be very efficient are environmental monitoring and civil protection.
There are many issues related to the use of drones especially in mountain environments, some are related to the legislation and others to the morphology of the terrain or to the use of particular hardware. Examples of the main problems to consider for programming a flight with drones are: maintaining a certain height respect to the soil, assure a constant visibility of the drone by the pilot at the ground, setting the triggering codes for "doing something" with the instruments and define velocity and delay time.
The common available applications for designing a flight plan for drones are mostly general purpose and usually not GIS based, so it is difficult to use georeferenced data with them. They do not consider the height of the terrain, which is important where there are high slopes and allow the user to define only some parameters and information related to the flight. All the other needed/specific parameters have to be added manually by the user.
Solution: The developed modules in JGrassTools and gvSIG calculate the flight plans for drones considering different elements like the presence of obstacles (including areas where overfly is not permitted), the slope of the terrain, the parameters of the instruments and the characteristics of the drone and of the required flight.
The tool is specially designed for flight plans of photogrammetry, but it can be personalized for different types of sensors (one application is also available for sensors of magnetism).
The user have to define:
- the general parameters of the drone
- some parameters of the instrument
- the flight region
- eventually the presence of obstacles
- the main direction of the flight
- one or more takeoff points.
The information about the geometries (flight region, obstacles, takeoff points and direction of the flight) will be provided as shapefiles with a list of predefined attributes created through the developed project wizard.
The program calculates the flight line considering these parameters together with the morphology of the terrain extracted to a provided DTM.
The result is the elaboration of one or more flight plans that is shown on the map and can be verified and directly exported in a format readable by drones and therefore used as base for the auto pilot.
Benefits: This tools is fully integrated in gvSIG and allows the user to use GIS based data and tools to design a flight plan. The most important thing is the possibility to add detailed information about the drone, the instrument and the morphology of the terrain which are considered automatically for the design of the flight plan.
The model can be personalized on different kind of drones and instruments and is adapted to different resolutions/details of the input data (DTM, ortophoto).
The final result is a shapefile containing all the waypoints of the flight plan/plans and a file or a set of files (in case that there is the need of more than one file to cover the entire flight region) containing the flight plan in a format readable by the drones.
Language: en
