LiDAR planning help

ROCK R360 R2A
1

Hello,

I’ve been recently hired by an engineering company to do a LiDAR scan of a small 40-acre resort development in Palau.

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I am looking for some advice and feedback on what would be the best way to accomplish a scan that has such a steep cliff. (I am using the M300 + R2A)

What would be the best flight parameters for this type of terrain (AGL, side & frontal overlap %, speed, etc)?

Is terrain following recommended? If so, how can this be accomplished? I see that DJI Pilot app has the terrain following feature if we enable the RTK. Does anyone know if I do set up the D-RTK base and enable RTK on the M300 if it’ll interfere with the GPS receiver we attach on the arm for the R2A?
If not this method for terrain following, any other way to accomplish this?

Also what about GCP placement? What would be a good number of GCP’s to capture and where would be good to place them in this type of terrain?

Any other recommendation or help will be greatly appreciated! :pray:

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we fly heavily wooded tracts and our default settings for the R2A are:

~ 50m AGL
~ 5 m/s horizontal speed
~ 50% side overlap

There’s been nothing these settings have not been able to penetrate for solid 1-foot contour deliverables.

We use UgCS for mission planning, so Terrain Follow is built into the software. Flying your project using UgCS is about as uncomplicated as you can get.

I’m assuming since you have the R2A, that you also have the REACH RS2. We ditched the DJI Pilot app for our missions and never looked back…

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Thanks for the feedback Robert. I’m glad to hear that terrain following is easy as using UgCS! We use the R2A with the Leica GS16 to collect the Rinex data.

We actually use UgCS for our aeromagnetic surveying, but with a radar altimeter to follow the terrain at 2 feet AGL (which doesn’t work at 200ft). I never tested UgCS’s built-in terrain follow feature. Just curious, did you have to fly a mission prior to get the DEM, upload it to UgCS and use terrain follow from there?

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No Sir, we didn’t need to do any prior flights for DEM information; that’s automatically built into the software. If you click on Parameters icon, then click on “Show Elevation” from scroll down menu, you’ll see the terrain info. Wasn’t assuming you were fully aware of this, so…

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You certainly can fly first and then use a DEM created with Rock Surveyor. In cliffy type environments this is the ideal workflow.

Fly at higher than desired (safe) altitude to get an initial scan used to create a DEM.

Use that DEM in UgCS to fly lower the second time for higher accuracy and point density.

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