Waypoints limit

[Giannandrea]

Hi all, I'm exploring UGCS with a P4A, in view of the M600 which I'm expecting next week.
Being roads' surveying the purpose of all this I will have many rectangular areas/strips which will follow the road's geometry as much as possible.

The missions shall be designed taking into account the batteries duration (roughly 20 mns for a 2 kg payload) as well as the camera (Sony alfa7rii) battery's capacity which is said to be of 340 pics in Jpeg.

However, the main constraint does not seem to be batteries, but rather the maximum number of waypoints that the Matrice600 autopilot can handle, which is said to be 99. SHould be 99 the max waypoints, roughly every 400 mts, I will have to land, upload the next mission and take off again.

Did any of you find other solutions with UGCS or other softwares, like merging successive missions or adding a piece of hardware or software to increase to waypoints limits?

 

[Jesse G]

Hi all, I'm exploring UGCS with a P4A, in view of the M600 which I'm expecting next week.
Being roads' surveying the purpose of all this I will have many rectangular areas/strips which will follow the road's geometry as much as possible.

The missions shall be designed taking into account the batteries duration (roughly 20 mns for a 2 kg payload) as well as the camera (Sony alfa7rii) battery's capacity which is said to be of 340 pics in Jpeg.

However, the main constraint does not seem to be batteries, but rather the maximum number of waypoints that the Matrice600 autopilot can handle, which is said to be 99. SHould be 99 the max waypoints, roughly every 400 mts, I will have to land, upload the next mission and take off again.

Did any of you find other solutions with UGCS or other softwares, like merging successive missions or adding a piece of hardware or software to increase to waypoints limits?

Are you using the photogrammetry planning tool? Have you tried planning the flight using the "trigger camera by time" option? If you use that option and dont have the "additional waypoints" box checked it only creates waypoints at the end of flight lines and at any points needed to keep a constant elevation AGL. I've used this method to map about 2000 meters of roadway per flight with a phantom 4 pro.

 

[Jim Dow]

Hi all, I'm exploring UGCS with a P4A, in view of the M600 which I'm expecting next week.
Being roads' surveying the purpose of all this I will have many rectangular areas/strips which will follow the road's geometry as much as possible.

The missions shall be designed taking into account the batteries duration (roughly 20 mns for a 2 kg payload) as well as the camera (Sony alfa7rii) battery's capacity which is said to be of 340 pics in Jpeg.

However, the main constraint does not seem to be batteries, but rather the maximum number of waypoints that the Matrice600 autopilot can handle, which is said to be 99. SHould be 99 the max waypoints, roughly every 400 mts, I will have to land, upload the next mission and take off again.

Did any of you find other solutions with UGCS or other softwares, like merging successive missions or adding a piece of hardware or software to increase to waypoints limits?

Why should we accept a waypoint limit of 99? There are good practical application-based reasons why we should not accept such an arbitrary limit. Using curved flight lines to a) obtain a superior diversity of views or b) to mitigate the systematic SfM doming (elevation) error are just two reasons.

Refer to the following research to validate the use of curved flight lines:

Minimising systematic error surfaces in digital elevation models using oblique convergent imagery
Rene Wackrow

Jim H. Chandler
First published: 16 March 2011

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-9730.2011.00623.x

Results of the simulation process, the laboratory test and the practical test are reported in this paper and demonstrate that an oblique convergent image configuration eradicates the systematic error surfaces which result from inaccurate lens distortion parameters. This approach is significant because by removing the need for an accurate lens model it effectively improves the accuracies of digital surface representations derived using consumer‐grade digital cameras. Carefully selected image configurations could therefore provide new opportunities for improving the quality of photogrammetrically acquired data.