Map Pilot & Drone Deploy - Winterburn Mission
Two missions were flown using the Winterburn school as a mission site for flight planning. Both flights used autonomous flight planning with Map Pilot and Drone Deploy respectively. Map Pilot is an iOS application that only runs on iPhone or iPad and costs around US$15. Drone Deploy is an open source flight planning application that runs on Android and iOS.
Our initial test flight with Map Pilot proved to be a little more difficult than expected. It was not very intuitive to upload the flight planning data to the drone, and initialise and fly it. However, the pre-flight planning was relatively easy to get to the location, define the altitude and fence the project area. The pre-flight mission planning worked well on both applications.
Drone Pilot was easier to initialise and upload flight data to the drone. However, it did not seem to cache the Google map that was used to set up the mission. Nevertheless, Drone Pilot seems to be easier to use and it has an advantage that it supports both iOS and Android and it is free to download and use.
In both cases the apps were created to sell their cloud based mapping services. Map Pilot is associated with 'Maps Made Easy':
https://www.mapsmadeeasy.com/ and https://www.dronesmadeeasy.com/Articles.asp?ID=254
Maps Made Easy is a pay as you go mapping service starting at US$7.99 for 300 points, which covers about 48.5 ha (120 acres). If you sign up smaller map areas are free.
Drone Deploy provides a free service (500 photos/map) with 5 map projects a month or a monthly service fee of US$99 for 1000 photo/map unlimited number of maps:
https://www.dronedeploy.com/
Its free on-line map service will be used for training demonstration. Limitation is it only allows downloading of the 2D orthophoto of the project site. Other maps like the 3D, multispectral, digital surface, etc. is only available via the paid service.
Our initial test flight with Map Pilot proved to be a little more difficult than expected. It was not very intuitive to upload the flight planning data to the drone, and initialise and fly it. However, the pre-flight planning was relatively easy to get to the location, define the altitude and fence the project area. The pre-flight mission planning worked well on both applications.
Drone Pilot was easier to initialise and upload flight data to the drone. However, it did not seem to cache the Google map that was used to set up the mission. Nevertheless, Drone Pilot seems to be easier to use and it has an advantage that it supports both iOS and Android and it is free to download and use.
In both cases the apps were created to sell their cloud based mapping services. Map Pilot is associated with 'Maps Made Easy':
https://www.mapsmadeeasy.com/ and https://www.dronesmadeeasy.com/Articles.asp?ID=254
Maps Made Easy is a pay as you go mapping service starting at US$7.99 for 300 points, which covers about 48.5 ha (120 acres). If you sign up smaller map areas are free.
Drone Deploy provides a free service (500 photos/map) with 5 map projects a month or a monthly service fee of US$99 for 1000 photo/map unlimited number of maps:
https://www.dronedeploy.com/
Its free on-line map service will be used for training demonstration. Limitation is it only allows downloading of the 2D orthophoto of the project site. Other maps like the 3D, multispectral, digital surface, etc. is only available via the paid service.
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