Using Litchi with Google Earth Support for a job 2000 miles away

[Mike]

Greetings everyone

Hopefully this is the correct section to post this. Any pilots here tried the new Litchi with Google Earth Pro support? Played on the pc a few nights ago and created a flight plan on Google Earth Pro and then exported the data from Google Earth Pro into Litchi. The resulting camera paths setup and creating point of interest flights were terrible and it would seem to be better handled in Litchi for getting precise UAV movement and camera setup for shots. Creating the the UAV missions in Litchi first and then exporting the data into Google Earth Pro will be my next test. I got a client in another country (2000 miles or 3200 km away) where I am doing some architectural 3D animations for and will need drone footage of the site. My original plan was to create the mission in Litchi and save the mission out so that my client can get his drone guy to fly the mission that I will upload. But exporting the mission into Google Earth Pro and then creating an animation of the virtual flight would let stakeholders review the flight before commiting to an actual UAV mission. Some thoughts and questions:

1. Has anyone got good results when using Google Earth Pro to Litchi? Flight paths seem to be problematic
2. Hopefully Google Earth Pro is up to date with there 3D buildings as I will need to fly above and around the buildings
3. Uploading the flight plan and letting another drone company fly the mission will save me having to fly 2000 miles to the site, get foreign insurance or get a 107 certification
4. Use Google Earth Pro animations to verify Litchi UAV missions and not plan them

Thanks

Mike

 

[BigAl07]

I've not used your exact process (GE to Litchi) but I've done it the other way around.

But I will say this... if you sent me a Litchi plan to fly and you were 2K miles away, I would take my laptop to the jobsite, review the plan carefully, break it out into easily manageable sections and fly one section at a time very slowly and carefully. It's too easy for things to change/move/APPEAR on job sites daily and Google Earth can be several months out of date. I'm working on a job site that was just updated in GE last week and the images they used are from last September. The only reason I know this is because I've been shooting this particular site since July and can compare the images to my shots to know (within a month) when they shot their satellite images.

 

[Norm Kokes]

We recently were in Mazatlan Mexico and I programmed 3 missions from my home computer in MN. All were done in litchi and I used google earth for elevation reference. all the missions worked perfectly the only unexpected item was large numbers of birds which ended up not causing a problem but could have. Two of the missions involved flying 3/4 mile over water than across the island shoreline and back. One was inland around a marina and yes google maps is not up to date as there was a tower crane and several new buildings involved there so I had to monitor that flight closely. I lost connection at one point and when it came back I was getting obstruction warnings. I thought oh no not the tower crane! As it turned out it was the sun in the sensors not a crane. At any rate it worked great but you do have to do some diligence prior to actual flights.

 

[skyeboysteve]

One thing I've noticed is that distances on Google Earth are different than on the Litchi app. I noticed this when drawing a 0.10nm radius circle on Google Earth, then making a 0.10nm (608 feet) radius orbit on Litchi in the same area. The Litchi radius seems significantly larger. I haven't gotten around to measuring which one is closest in accuracy yet, but I wonder if this might cause problems when you import kml files into Litchi.

 

[Mike]

Hello all

Thank you for your thoughts and replies. Sorry for the late reply as the mission got delayed a bit and other work came up. I took the advice of chopping up the missions into smaller manageable flights and the operator was able to verify the flights and heights of the object. Looks like real location has changed somewhat from the Google Earth, buildings were bulldozed. I did a google search and found that a Mavic pilot created a very good software for importing Litchi flights and exporting the camera, flight info etc into Google Earth to create animations from. Saved me hours of trial and error of having the remote pilot download and fly the mission, film it and upload the video for me to verify. Works pretty good for me cuz my work flow involved creating a storyboard animation from the UAV flights and 3D animation videos edited together. One issue i had was that the UAV was not pausing at the way points like I had programmed it to in Litchi. Here is a link to the software I used that works for P4 Pro as well as Mavics

.Virtual Litchi Mission

Thank you