Beginner Tips for Drone Mapping - My Workflow

what's going on guys for the year and today we're gonna be going through some of the absolute basics that you'll need to know if you want to start making Maps with your drone now I've gotten a ton of questions recently through Instagram Twitter even on my email and YouTube a lot of people are wondering how they can start making a map what's the best place to start and that's probably sparked from a couple of drone deploy videos I've made over the past couple of weeks like how to make a 2d map how to make a 3d map also what the best drone for mapping is I'm gonna link those three videos down in the description if you want to take a look at those before you watch this video or maybe you want to go and watch those afterwards but if you're somebody who has a drone and you want to get into drone mapping this is gonna be a great place to start it's gonna be a great starting point for you as I'm gonna go through my entire workflow when it comes to flight planning and then also running the mission to make the map now I think a good place to start would be the hardware right the drone you're gonna be using to make these maps and the truth is you can pretty much get started with any drone that you've got now you can't expect to use like a cheap $100 drone off of Amazon so there is a small caveat there you need to use a drone that is slightly more advanced something from like DJI Alltel or unique but chances are if you've got a drone from one of those companies you can find a software that's compatible with that drone it will get in a software in just a second but again if you've got something from like the spark all the way up to the inspire you can get started mapping now what I recommend using a spark for bigger projects probably not just because the flight time is not that good also the resolution on the camera is a little bit low so if you wanted to do say like a 30 acre field you could be there for hours and hours an hour so I'd recommend starting small but we'll get into that when we get into my workflow the point that I'm trying to make here is you don't need to go out and buy any extra hardware if you already have a drone that's slightly advanced from one of those bigger manufacturers you can begin making 2d maps and 3d models today now if you find that you like it there's a lot of different accessories you can buy there's a lot of different options to go with like different cameras infrared near infrared cameras you've also got ground control points RTK drones there's a lot to learn about making good precise maps but if you want to get started you can likely just use the drone you have in your case your backpack or that's just sitting around in your house now you will need to pair this drone with software and there is hundreds of different options out there to choose from when it comes to mapping software they all should come with their own trial periods you can bounce around between different software's give them a try see which one you like best as sometimes software can be used or preference but in my opinion I would say that drone deploy is the most powerful I've bounced around I've tried different options and I just keep coming back to drone deploy now each of these software's will offer one benefit over the other so pix 4d might have more customization than your own deployed and DJI Terra might be within the ecosystem of DJI so it's just easier to use but drone deploy at the end of the day offers the best well-rounded experience in my opinion their plans can get pretty pricey but they give you a 14-day free trial so again you can bounce around try mapping with different software's and see which one that you like and I promise if you get into mapping and the work is there the drone deploy subscription will pay for itself or whatever software you choose to go with so I know that the first portion of this video was pretty tedious but there are two vital pieces of information you obviously need the hardware the drone to fly the mission and to shoot the photos and you also need the software to plan the mission and to stitch those photos together after the fact and I could go through both of those pieces of info even more in-depth I can compare drones I can compare software but at the end of the day when you're getting started all you need to know is you can use the drone that you have and you can also use free trial software to actually stitch those photos together and to plan your missions now speaking of planning missions I want to go through my workflow when I plan a mission when I plan a flight and also what I do when I show up on site so I prefer using drone deploy as I've already said and I also prefer creating this mission with my computer I like the mouse I like the keyboard it just makes things a lot easier what's great about drone deploy is that alongside their web app they also offer an iOS app and an Android app so I'm able to create edit and manage my projects from pretty much any device that I own and this makes it easy to create a project on my computer screen a much bigger screen with my mouse and then I can edit the parameters on site if I have to right from my phone or my tablet and a great example of this is let's say you're mapping a construction site and it continues to change as you go there obviously the building gets higher but also one day they could bring on a crane so you're able to just change your flight altitude or your like parameters right there within your app depending on what's there on site so what we'll do is create this test project above this turf field we'll name it test and the first step I like to go through when creating a map or I guess a flight plan is to just set the flight area so I'll manipulate these little bubbles around the outside again I want to capture this turf field so from this angle or from this area we'll be able to capture the bleachers on the outside we'll be able to capture this track going around the outside and of course the field in the middle and if you want to create another point like you've got an abnormal area you're trying to I guess map you're gonna be able to drag one of these metal portions out create a longer area but for me just a little rectangle is going to work perfect now what I like to do is go a little bit overkill and actually extend the area I want to map larger than what actually has to be captured and I do this for one specific reason sometimes the exterior around the edges gets a little bit messed up when it comes to the stitching and I'll show you what I mean when I show you an example but for me being able to capture more area just works best I'd rather spend a little bit more time capturing this map and make sure it's perfect rather than have to run the entire mission again after all the images process because something got messed up now because we've increased this flight area the flight time is going to increase as well as the amount of images taken but it can remember I'd rather spend more time now our next step will be to change the flight altitude and this is going to directly correlate to the resolution so it makes sense right the lower your drone is the higher the resolution the map is going to be so for me what I found to be like a perfect blend of speed and resolution is 150 feet so for all of my maps I fly 150 and then if I get on site and I say well you know what maybe I'm gonna have a better time or a safer time if I fly 170 then I'll do so but for me I start at 150 for pretty much all of my maps again it gives us the perfect blend of resolution and speed now we'll notice the flight time has gone up yet again and the amount of images captured has gone up again but remember my philosophy spend a little bit more time on this map because you don't want to have to come back now moving on I like to keep structures mode turned on if I'm capturing a structure so for here I'm gonna be trying to get a 3d model of like the bleachers and the light pole so I'll keep structures mode turned on and for live map right now I'm on like a free plan just has it like a test for this video I like to keep this turned off I've actually found that it messes up my maps sometimes it actually relates to like the SD card having an error so for me I keep live map turned off you can turn this feature on I'll leave a link down in the description so you can see how it operates but for me I keep this turned off and I keep structures mode turned on but you're gonna want to keep this turned on or off depending on the project so for me I'm capturing a structure I'll keep it turned on but if you're just gonna be capturing a field all you need is 2d so you can turn structures mode off and will save you a little bit of flight time I can remember for this example we'll leave this turned on the next step I like to take when creating this flight plan is to go down to the Advanced Settings and turn off the automatic settings so now we have the ability to change the front and side overlap the flight direction the mapping flight speed and the starting Waypoint now the front overlap and the side overlap will allow you to change how much these images are going to overlap so overlap is very important when it comes to stitching software you want to make sure that each image shows like objects down on the ground so that the software has an easier time of stitching them together so you want to make sure that these are fairly high and you'll notice if you take that side overlap down below 60 it'll say that at least 60% is recommended but for me for the front overlap and the side overlap I'd recommend doing 75 and 75% now we'll notice as we change the side overlap we now have to do more passes which then relates to more images and more flight time but my philosophy is to shoot more so that your map looks as best as possible the front overlap is gonna decide how many photos are being taken as it runs along these green lines and the side overlap directly correlates to how many lines and how many passes aren't made so for me 75 75 is the sweet spot the flight direction should be set for you pretty much out of the gate 73 looks fine to me you want to make sure that these lines are going along like the longest portion of the flight plan now if we changed this flight direction to like let's say we'll do this right we'll do 54 now we've got like this diagonal thing going on in these lines or these passes are much shorter than these longer passes so for me I like to just keep this at what was it like 71 73 that looks about good to me again we're gonna be making these passes along the longest poor so everything looks perfect moving on the mapping flight speed is set to 34 miles per hour I keep that set all the way up all the time and my starting weight point this will depend like what mission you're gonna be running for me one is fine but sometimes for certain missions you might want to start at a different way point depending on what you're capturing now that pretty much concludes what we need to do to create this map as you can see we've got our flight perimeter or flight area all laid out we've also got all the correct parameters so we've got our flight direction at 73 degrees we've got our side overlap at 75 degrees the front overlap at 75 degrees we've also got the flight altitude at 150 feet we've got structures mode turned on to capture a nice 3d model and you'll see that these are our parameters up here I guess the statistics or whatever you want to call these so we're gonna be flying for 25 minutes it's gonna be 18 acres there's gonna be 541 images captured and this should take us about two batteries now I actually already ran this mission so if we go over to my main account my pro account you'll notice that this is the mission that I actually ran it took 43 minutes and captured 11 acres it captured 826 images and the reason that it took so much longer is because you'll notice I have a pretty much second flight plan I'm running here going the other way and this is because I have enhanced 3d turned on because I'm here on the pro plan you'll notice I have enhanced 3d rather than what was it on the other one it was structures mode so for this one I've got enhanced 3d we've run into the advanced settings I've got this crosshatch 3d 3d feature and if we turn this off well then those lines go away now the main reason I wanted to show you this is not to show you the flight plan because obviously we just went over that I did want to show you guys the crosshatch 3d just some of the different propane features but I really wanted to show you is the final project right so remember how I told you I wanted to capture more because you see how the exterior of this is a little bit messed up these areas didn't stitch properly but what I can do now is go into the map details I can crop this down I can then adjust my crop to what I want so I'm going to bring it down to just the field you know bring it a little bit closer here bring oh you have I forgot I wanted to capture part of the track so we'll bring it to there we'll bring it to there actually a little bit tough so we'll crop it down this about here it looks good well checkmark there's absolutely no stitching errors around the outside it all looks perfect in my opinion and remember we pretty much went overkill with the resolution and the overlap but if we zoom in you're able to get such great detail on this map and it definitely pays off to fly at a lower altitude if you can now if we go back to the actual map itself will zoom out from this map we are able to see the plant health which we probably won't use on this just because we're not really doing this map for plant health we're not using it for plant health but we could see elevation if we wanted to right we can now see the elevation of all these different areas we can change this down change the little histograms I like to call it down so we can see some of the different elevations we can read the feet the the height a little bit better we can also use these tools right we can set locations down we can take distance measurements we can take area measurements we can take volume measurements we can drop counts right but in my opinion the coolest is the 3d model remember I tried crosshatch 3d I tried perimeter 3d and I would say that this turned out pretty cool now underneath of the bleachers seems to be the area where it's most messed up here's a little tip for you guys if you're gonna be doing 3d models up here in the top right corner you can toggle between HD and SD I always go in HD it just makes it look so much better but being able to see this has a 3d model is really really cool now once you've made your flight plan once the mission is ready to go you've pretty much done I'd say 80 to 90% of the work I look left to do is drive to the site set up your drone set up your equipment put it up in the air allow it to execute the mission land it pack everything up and then go home and upload those photos there you've got your map and you'll understand as you get more drone mapping work in the future for something you want to do that it's probably the easiest thing you can do as the drone does a lot of the flying for yourself but it's expensive and it's time-consuming and it depends on what industry you're going to be mapping for so if you're doing agriculture it might not be as long yes there's going to be very big fields but it doesn't need to be the highest resolution your overlap can be small or it can be a lower percentage but if you're going to be doing something like construction where accuracy precision and resolution are key you're going to need to do more passes at a lower altitude therefore you're going to spend more time on site so again it kind of depends on what type of mission you're running or I guess overall what you're going to be mapping now when I show up on a site there are a couple of things I do other than just throwing the drone on the ground and send it up first of all I'll do a manual flight around the area I'm mapping I'll do a couple passes around and if I notice that there's something in the way like a high structure then I'll put the drone even higher or what I'll do is I'll go in the software and I'll change my altitude to remember my base altitude is 150 for most of my missions when I start but if I notice that there's like a tower or a tree or maybe there's a hill like the land slopes up then I'll go and I'll adjust my elevation or my altitude within the mission accordingly now I know that everybody has their own pre-flight checklist that they like to go through before they fly their drone but the good thing about these automated drone mapping software's is they do a lot of the hard work for you so for example drone deploy when you put your drone in the ground and before do you execute your mission it goes through and checks all of your permissions it checks all of your internal components and make sure that your drone is in good status and then once the drone gets up to a high enough altitude where you're going to be shooting it calibrates the camera focus and changes all of the camera settings for you you don't have to do anything even if you were shooting before in RAW format with your drone it'll change it to JPEG it'll shoot the photos for you I mean it does a lot of the work for you it's great now there is one final tip that I can give you guys when you're going to be mapping with your drone and it's gonna make things a lot easier it's gonna take some stress off of you and that is to trust your drone these aircraft are so good now all of the sensors inside are awesome if you took the time to plan your mission properly you shouldn't have any issues so really just at the end of the day have trust in your drone put it on the ground have trust it's gonna go up by itself it's gonna run the mission by itself it's going to come back and land in the same spot by itself I mean as long as you've got a nice open area you're going to be taking off from there's nothing in the way it might vary by a couple of inches every time it comes down and lands but at the end of the day all you have to do is change that battery and restart your mission and keep an eye on it as it's flying to the air the drone will do the rest and as long as you can trust it as long as you have the faith in your drone it's not gonna go haywire it's not go to crash then it's gonna make your drone mapping a lot more easy in the future especially if you do this as a job and he do it for clients being able to have your drone go up by itself and stay calm cool and collected on the ground is going to say a lot about you and your skill as a drone operator now anyway guys that's pretty much all I have in terms of these beginner tips I'm definitely going to make some more advanced videos in the future some things that I do to make my maps look perfect and make them look better it is gonna cost some money because drone mapping can get pretty expensive but again remember if the work is there it's definitely a lucrative business now if you guys have any questions feel free to leave them down in the comment section also if you guys are not new to mapping and you've been doing it for a while and you have any other tips and tricks leave them down there as well anyway guys I hope you enjoy the video and as always I'll talk to you later pace [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Billy Kyle

Views: 47,721

Keywords: Billy Kyle, Drone, DJI, Drone Mapping, Drone Map, 2D Drone Map, Drone Model, 3D Drone Model, Drone Mapping Tips, DroneDeploy, DroneDeploy Tips, How to make a map with a drone, Drone Mapping Beginner Tips, DJI Drone Map, Pix4D, Pix4D Mapping, DroneDeploy Mapping, DroneDeploy Map

Id: yPOhQdIqxnM

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2019