DJI Ground Station Pro and the Mavic 2 Pro. 3D mapping modeling

hey everybody happy Black Friday so right now I'm sitting here on my iPad I've got an iPad Mini that I actually purchased one year ago today Black Friday at 2017 the whole reason that I actually purchased the iPad Mini was for one thing and one thing only to be able to use ground station pro so I just pulled up ground station Pro and I'm looking at a quick little flight path area so ground station Pro is a DJI product and it is an iPad only product so if you want to fly this with an Android smartphone or Android tablet you can't if you want to use an iPhone you can't you can only use an iPad with ground station Pro currently so that's why last year I picked up my iPad Mini on Black Friday because huge discount on it last year so that was fantastic and it gave me the opportunity to try out ground station Pro for doing 3d modeling and mapping with my DJI Mavic I now have the Matic 2 pro as well and that has really spurred me to check out ground station Pro again so months and months ago I actually did some flights and posted some items on Arizona drone about flying with ground station Pro and there are actually a couple of things that really bothered me that didn't work very well on ground station Pro for doing my modeling so I kind of dropped it and started using mat pilot buy maps made easy and also using lychee a lot more for my automated flight but with the changes that have recently come out in the new ground station Pro I actually think that we've got some possibilities now to create some higher-end models so we're gonna try that out today and before we go any further I just want to let you know the audio quality is a little different on this video today I'm actually using my Apple earpods while I'm doing the screen recording the reason why I'm using the Apple earpods is quite simple right now I'm going to be connecting up my drone controller to the iPad Mini when I do that the lightning cable is going to be plugged into the iPad Mini so I can't plug in a lav mic here so instead I'm using the Bluetooth air pods to do the audio recording of this now before we go any further as well we're going to step back from this particular layout and we're going to create a completely new one on ground station Pro so you can see how the layout is created so I'm just hitting the back arrow key here and what I'm going to do so that was mission number nine I had tested that out before I'm going to go ahead and add a new mission and we're gonna do a 3d map area now I've got two options here I can tap out the area so I can pre-plan my flight or when I get to the location where I'm going to be doing my 3d model I could actually use the drone to mark out the edges which is really great if you're going somewhere that doesn't have any reference points when you're laying out your 3d map area let's say you're going to a new development that right now is all dirt and there's no houses on it you might not have any frame of reference as to where you should be flying in those cases you can mark out your areas using the aircraft which is just awesome but we're gonna do tap here and right now we're seeing the map area that we're going to be working on so all I'm going to do is I'm going to tap and it gives me a block and what I can do is click and drag so I'm going to click and drag this over here we're just going to make a model of some of the rock formations in the granite Dells and we're going to keep this a very small very manageable model so there we go that's the layout that I want to use and now we can talk about what's going on with ground station Pro on the right hand side if you're new to ground station Pro up on the top bar when we connect up drone we're going to have some different things so upper left corner says not connected the mode says not applicable the next symbol moving right is satellite positioning so we don't have satellite positioning because we're not connected to the drone yet next one is my controller and it's signal strength once again not connected to the drone yet next item is no camera once we fire up the drone we will have camera information and then we will have battery information for the drone finally we have the iPads power level right now at 81% and then over to the right we've got some settings that we can get into and finally we can fly our mission with that plane symbol now let's take a look at the right hand column so I've laid out my flight area and as you can see so we've got paths going back and forth now this is one of the things they did not like with ground station Pro from the get-go his ground station Pro doesn't allow you to do a full grid so you can't do a full crosshatch pattern you can do this parallel paths but for getting all angles and edges for a 3d model this is a little inconvenient I do have a way to get around that though and we'll talk about that in a bit so looking over on the right-hand side this is mission number 10 I could real Abel that and I probably will later it's telling me I've got 12 lines for my main path that we're gonna fly 4,500 92 feet and that we're gonna cover about 5 acres now there's more to that screen but first we're gonna go down under the basics so we've got our camera model that we can select and in the camera model they have now added the Mavic 2 pro camera so we will add that after we've got several ways to shoot now so our shooting angle can be parallel to the main path and you're gonna miss a lot of data that way even doing it perpendicular to the main path one of the things that I really complained about when it came to ground station Pro was the fact that it's always shooting in one direction so if we start this project with perpendicular to the main path what's going to happen is the drone is going to fly from south to north so if you see the little s symbol there that's my starting point it's gonna fly from south to north it's gonna move over and then it's gonna fly backwards from north to south keeping the camera facing north the entire time that means that the faces on the north side of these rocks we're never going to capture very well so that was something that really bothered and disappointed me with ground station Pro but now that we have the new version of ground station Pro we have an opportunity for something called course aligned so now the drone will make its 180 degree turns as it works along these parallel paths so that means it'll be photographing north and photographing South on the next pass so hopefully this is going to generate better 3d area models for us the next item capture at equal distance interval so we could have it hover and capture which will take us the longest but hopefully get us the best-looking model we can capture it equal time intervals and you can set how many seconds apart you want the photos or you can capture it equal distance intervals for this test we're going to go with equal distance intervals the next item is inside mode or scan mode for your flight course I'm gonna stick with inside mode because I don't want to go way out overlapping areas outside of my defined flight area so I'm gonna go with inside mode then we have the speed which is set for us based on the mission and we have our shutter interval then we have our altitude and our resolution now in the case of this model I'm going to raise the altitude a little bit the higher up you go the shorter the mission is but the higher up you go the less detail you might get but I just want to let's just put this and two hundred and fourteen feet sounds really good to me and it's telling me my resolution is going to be 2 centimeters per pixel okay now below that we have our Latin lunge we're not going to do anything with this right now the next tab that I'm going to hit is the advance button because we also can define our overlap the more overlap we have the more accurate that our model is going to be the better representation we're going to create in that 3d model so I'm going to push that up to 80% and for the front overlap and I'm going to push that up to 80% for the side overlap as well now you'll notice that we've got some more path lines here because we're having to make more passes now the next item that we have is also course angle so we can actually change the course angle watch those little green lines switch around and for now I did like the course angle of 90 percent so we're 90 degrees excuse me so I'm going to put that back there there we go so I just tapped that back into 90 we can also change our margins and we can change the gimbal pitch so right now the gimbal is going to be shooting straight down now shooting straight down means that we're gonna lose some of our faces now if you take a look at pics for DS capture app you'll notice that pics for D on its flights always default sets things to 70 degrees negative 70 instead of negative 90 so right now for this particular model I'm going to go ahead and shoot straight down so we're not going to change the pitch angle but after we look at our model we might decide that we want to our final item here is we also have what is the end of mission action we can return to home we can hover it or we can land it where it finishes I'm going to go with return to home and for return to home I'm actually going to make sure that it's a little higher as well remember we set the mission at 200 and something feet so let's take a look at that I'm going to go back up to basic and so we're flying at 214 feet is where we're gonna fly the mission and the return to home is going to be a 217 feet and I'm comfortable with that because I know the terrain around here so I'm not super super concerned now let's take a look at one more thing I'm going back to basic but up below mission 10 you'll notice where it says 4.49 acres that there's three dots here I can swipe the left and so the next piece of information that ground station pro gives me is that this flight should take four minutes and 43 seconds it should take one battery it's going to take 93 photos for me so in total this mission is pretty much ready to go I am going to pop in here and actually put a new name for the mission for when I save it so let's call this G s Pro whoops autocorrect you got to be kidding me jaspera that's funny so here we go GS Pro space Mavic - alright so that's looking good to me and now that I've got this initial modeling flight laid out upper left corner below the arrow is the save your mission so now if I arrow back there we go ground station pro Mavic - so that mission is ready to go as I said before I'm not satisfied that I can't do a full grid pattern but there is a way to deal with that if you're quick and you're doing a small model so how can I deal with that I'm going to make a copy of the same exact path so there it is copy of ground station pro and now I'm going to edit that one for my editing I'm going to do a very very simple thing I am going to change my flight path so under course angle under advanced I'm going to dial this back to zero so this one combined with the other one going to give me a full grid pattern so I'm going to go ahead and hit save on it so now if I go look back at my missions let's see that one really quick alright so that is the copy and then the other one same exact footprint is going to be flown again but we have actually changed the directions between the two so combining these two together is going to get us our grid pattern finally I want to take a look at the Edit again so this one says that it's 4 minutes and 39 seconds the other minute the other one was 4 minutes and some-odd seconds as well so this entire thing should be doable on one battery so the next step is for us to actually go and fly this all right everyone so I did my first test I actually flew the first half of this mission with the DJI Mavic 2 Pro I wanted to test it out before we committed to putting this part on video so part 1 GS pro Mavic 2 has been completed and now I'm going to click on copy of ground station Pro Mavic 2 and as you can see the flight pattern has changed so I could go in here to edit if I need to so I'm actually going to go into that edit and a different camera is connected so let's see yes it automatically detected the mavica 2 pro so fantastic we are ready to go I've already done all of my flight checks and what we're looking at now let's look at that top screen we're flying a Mavic 2 pro on the left hand side we're in GPS mode we have 14 satellites we have full signal between the controller and the drone we have full signal for the video feedback from the Mavic 2 pro camera i've got 68 percent battery left on the Mavic - and i've got 71 percent battery on my iPad so we are good to go I'm going to step away from the drone and on the right hand side I've got a little plane symbol I go ahead and tap that plane symbol it's going to ask me so I am in a Class D airspace I do have permission to fly I did the LA ANC before taking off so I'm going to unlock that and we've got the one battery at 67% the camera is good the end of the mission activity is to return to home so I'm going to go ahead and hit start to fly and the drone is firing itself up and there goes the drone so it's taking off and down on the lower left-hand side you can see the altitude is going up right now because we're going to go a little over 200 feet so the drone is getting itself set up this is fully autonomous flight and do excuse the wind noise I am outside and one of the realities of being outside is wind happens especially in the desert Southwest so now we're actually seeing the drone fly to its starting point so I did the North South and South Norris before now we're doing the east to west and west to east and it's collecting up the images so down the lower left hand side for this part of the new mission right now it tells me I have zero photos and there it goes it fired the first photo so we had set this equal distance before and remember that we also had some pretty good overlap so this should start looking really good on the modeling software that we're going to test it on after so initial impressions here so far ground station pros doing a good job with the Mavic to pro and only our final results will tell us how it really did so we've set up two missions so that we could make that grid pattern instead of just the parallel lines patterns you'll also notice that the camera is facing in the same direction as the drones flight like I said on the previous version of ground station Pro for doing 3d map areas that was not an available item so that meant that you were always shooting in one direction and potentially failing to capture some really important information by shooting in other directions as well especially if you're trying to do a 3d model you want as much information as much data as possible so looking at the lower left side again we're up to 20 photos and we can also pop up from the lower right side to pop up our camera so looking up at the top bar right below it I set everything to auto for doing this 3d model so we've got auto ISO auto shutter so right now the shutters at one one twentieth of a second and now with the new maverick 2 pro camera we do have control over after so the aperture here is F 4.5 so this is keeping everything lit properly and I set the white balance to sunny and we're using the SD card so we're not using the onboard the bored storage right now we're at 57% battery on the drone and at 69% battery on the iPad now at any point along this mission we could in fact hit the pause button manually fly the drone back and swap out batteries if we needed to swap out batteries oh and by the way we are doing autofocus as well so I'm letting ground station pro control the entire flight and the image captured and we'll see how this 3d model comes out of it I'm gonna switch back to my actual flight pattern mode now and just keep my eyes on the sky is here so the drones not going very far at all on me for this one it's very very close we kept this to a very narrow area because we just wanted to see you know what we could produce with this so the first phase of this whole tutorial we set up our flight without having to be connected to the drone the second part was we actually brought the drone out here and we're flying the two missions that we created for the drone for this 3d model the third and final part of this tutorial is going to be actually seeing how the model gets assembled by a couple of cloud-based programs and by a couple of standalone desktop programs but I have on my iMac let me tell you by the way the iMac the 21 inch with eight gigs of ram is way underpowered for doing modeling so I'm definitely going to want something with a little more power to it and I'm actually considering building a windows mapping only machine just because it's very clear to me you need some horsepower when you start doing some of these larger models but since we're doing this model for fun we can work around the amount of time it takes to process so the biggest part is just the processing time after it as you can see on the screen we still got our little blue arrow drones doing its thing it's still taking its photos we're up to 81 on this particular mission but don't forget we've got the previous mission that you didn't get to see because I wanted to test it up if mistakes are gonna be made check it out beforehand before you record it because then I'll just bore you to tears as I try to figure out what did I do wrong so overall I really do like the interface of ground station pro and hopefully with the minor changes that they've made to where I can shoot along my flight paths this product will be improving one of the other things that I really do like about ground station Pro is the fact that it also has Waypoint missions so that's something that I love about litchi and basically grantstation Pro is putting together parts of two applications that I really like I really like map pilot buy maps made easy and that does great 3d grits and then I really like lychee for that pre-programmed flight and being able to pre program your flight beforehand when you're not even out in the field you can actually set up your waypoints and for Waypoint missions and actions and then when you get to your actual shooting location you can just get right to work so ground station Pro is kind of a combination of two of my favorite applications and earlier in 2018 I came to the conclusion that it didn't do a good job at either so each of those did a better job on their own but hopefully with these couple of minor changes that DJI has made with this product maybe ground station pro can actually be my all-in-one 3d modeling and Waypoint Mission application we're just going to have to see but remember for those of you who aren't iPad owners this is an iPad only application which I find very sad for for a DJI drone pilots because I think it'd be great to be able to use my iPhone on this as well all right it's coming in for a landing so I'm going to take over control now on the final final landing spot and then bring all this back in offload our images and start building a 3d model and there we go the drone is down all right let's pop out of these applications and we'll get back to work all right so I'm back inside and at the computer and with my regular microphone now apologies for the lower quality audio earlier in this in this video but you know working outside you've got a you've got to set up some way that's reliable and the air pods are pretty reliable when I'm recording and flying at the same time so what we're looking at here right now I've got the model up in photoscan so this model was generated with our two ground station pro flights and in total 219 images went into creating this particular 3d model so looking at this ground station Pro did a pretty nice job I'm zooming in so I just tilted the 3d map a little bit you'll see that our trees are melting and not filled in and that's also because of where I was flying it so my cutoff point was right along here where I'm dragging dragging my cursor along to show you so that was about my actual cutoff where I was having the drone fly to the same thing can be noted down at the bottom edge of this map too but looking in the center area I've got to say that this came out fairly nice and we've got some good detail as well looking into the canyons and getting a look at the rock formations you can really see where the canyon areas start and end so you can get an idea of water flow during monsoon season you know bottom line ground station pro did a pretty good job now beyond just looking at this on photo scan so I'm just twisting that around take a look at the rocks again so not bad the area that I really wanted to capture has come out fairly well I also did this let's pull up Google did this on drone deploy as well so looking on drone deploy we've got a pretty decent model again so I'm liking the look of this the textures look really good the rock formations look pretty realistic we still gonna have these melted trees because it's not going to be perfect and we didn't do the ninety percent overlap but still this is looking like a nice model so I'm gonna say off the bat that the new version of ground station Pro is definitely delivering a little more to me next time around I might want to redo this model with that 70 degree tilt instead of the 90 degree tilt just to see if it does a better job on the cliff faces and maybe even on the trees as well so finally I did run this through picks 4d as well and I'm gonna quit photoscan here and picks 4d I ran into a problem so I want to share this with you and we're gonna bring this up in the next session because I'm gonna do a part two and potentially a part three on this testing with ground station pro so I just want you to take a look at this really fast I'm just opening up pics 4d really quick this is pics 4d model so not pix 4d mapper the problem I ran into that I want to show you this is the pics 4d model interface and all these little red dots are supposed to be my cameras so this is where pix 4d said things were when I shot this unfortunately the model was actually created up here at Canyon View Drive so the model was taking place in this area that I'm bringing my mouse around right now so where I am taking the mouse around here this is where the model was actually shot so why are we over a mile away in the pics 4d model program is completely and totally beyond me just as a double check I actually went in to flight logs to make sure that everything looked right and the GPS coordinates were right and they were I just pulled up err data real quick just to show you so this is the area where I flew this is the area where the images were taken and this area is a very good distance away from where pix 4d was showing my cameras so in the next episode of this ground station pro and Mavic tube protesting we're going to take a closer look at what the heck's going on why did pix 4d do that and the one positive here photoscan putting together the model did a good job drone deploy putting the model together did a good job and looking at my flight logs my flight logs are right on so they are where they're supposed to be so the flight logs aren't showing any discrepancies on location the only thing that is showing discrepancies on location is the pix 4d model so in the next video we'll quickly go over the mapping programs and where they did good and where they did bad and fortunately the ground station Pro application looks like it's doing a good job by the way one other thing to note that I'll be bringing up in the next one ground station Pro now has flight logs hooray the flight logs do not automatically sync I know they're supposed to auto sync but they're not Auto syncing this is just my experience and maybe other GS pro users are not having that problem but we'll talk about that too in the next episode and we'll talk about how to work around it and get your logs loaded so that you can see them on something like air data so I really like seeing this on air data because it tells me this is my first flight and it was 7 minutes and 52 seconds in total and then the second flight was 7 minutes and 24 seconds in total and these came together to produce that 3d model that we just presented well sorry if this one went a little too long and sorry about the differences in audio quality we'll continue working that out for work in the field versus work in the office thanks for joining me and I hope that this demo of ground station Pro has encouraged you to maybe try it out again if you do have an iPad and you're looking for other tools to use to help you with your 3d modeling you

Channel: Rich Charpentier

Views: 54,897

Keywords: Full Time Airstream Living, Full Time RV, Airstream Full Time, Airstream Solar Power, DJI, Mavic Pro, Mavic 2 Pro, DJI Mavic 2 Pro, DJI Mavic, Drone Photography, Drone Video, Drone, 3D Maps, 3D Models, Drone 3D Model, Commercial Drone Pilot, AZ Drone, Arizona Drone, Photography, Airstream, Drone Real Estate, Ground Station Pro, DJI GS Pro, 3D mapping, drone modeling, drone mapping, DJI Ground Station, 3d modeling, Commercial drone pilot, Arizona, Prescott

Id: 0JI6YKE-_QE

Length: 30min 20sec (1820 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 25 2018