UAV/ Drone Flight planning for complex structures

UAV/ Drone Flight planning for complex structures

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Agisoft Metashape Professional on Nebula Cloud provides functionality for generating drone flight plans for objects with complex geometry. The tutorial below describes basic workflow steps, under which you will be able to use the Plan Mission tool and create the optimal route for your drone to get a good quality model of your object.  

 

To generate a detailed mission plan, you need to perform a simple overhead flight and create a rough polygonal model. Flight safety can be assured by user-specified no-fly zones and automatic powerlines avoidance, supported starting from Metashape Professional 1.7 version. Rough polygonal models and user-defined shape layers are used to generate an optimal sequence of viewpoints, to be exported in KML or CSV formats for various drone controlling apps.

 

Capture a basic imagery set

Make an overhead flight over the region of interest to capture a basic imagery set. To capture vertical and concave surfaces better you may use an oblique (photogrammetry) survey preset in your drone app instead of taking only nadir photos. 

 

Building a rough polygonal model in the Metashape

1.  Import photos to Metashape, select the Add Photos command from the Workflow menu.

 

2. Select Align Photos... command from the Workflow menu sets the parameters for aligning photos. The alignment result will be displayed on the Model view. At this stage, Metashape estimates the camera position and orientation for each photo and generates a sparse point cloud consisting of the tie points.