Newbie questions. DJI 300/R2a

Ideal speed when flying a transmission corridor. (AGL?, Speed?, For every 100 feet the drone lidar captures 150 feet of ground points? This type of information.

Do you have an excel file with certain parameters you use when planning the mission. That easily calculates the above?

Do you usually do a one path shot for a Transmission Corridor?

When you have to splice a line together what is the best practice? So if we have a 10 mile power line and cant fly all 10 in one flight how do we splice the edges together.

If I fly down a line and then fly the uas back homes can I not process the time in between my final point and home or do I have to process it all?

What kind of flight time did y’all have with 300 as in only plan a mission of X feet and x time.

Looking forward to the responses.

Thanks

Great Questions @Lgeren!

The first thing to do is to create a camera profile on any mission planning software of your choice. Check out this post. This will allow for the correct overlap percentage on mission planning.

Now for flight heights. When doing a transmission corridor, between 200 ft and 225 ft is great. This will provide sufficient detail of the transmission structures and even capture guy lines. When you need finer detail (i.e. substation) then 150 ft is great.

For a corridor mission plan, I recommend to fly to the left of the structures and right of the structures, down and back. You can get a 300 ft ROW from a single pass but more often then not you will always fly back home. So just to the left and right gives you a great 300+ ft corridor at 200 ft AGL.

To connect multiple flights. This is easy, just get 20+ ft of overlap from your previous flight and this one and you are golden!

The only time you will need to possibly make any changes to the final processed data would be if you move the base station to a new location and the accuracy of your base station location has some error. In this case you would upload all the flights that used base station location number 1 to one project in the ROCK cloud then do the same for all the flights during the second base station location. Then put these two projects in a folder and use the compare function. At this point you can adjust one dataset to the other and correct any offset between the flights. ( it is usually very minimal )

Now we are adding the ability in the cloud to generate deliverables from a compare project, but for right now. You will take note of the offset x,y,z and go back to your original project and apply this and save. When you process or export these changes will be saved to your data.

BACK to the flight planning,

The M300 gets around 35-40 minutes with the R2A and we flew a 7 mile corridor with 1 set of batteries!

you can see the data here → R2A High Voltage Transmission Corridor | ROCK Robotic Cloud

Any data can be selected for production of LAS using the PCmaster software.

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WGS 84 / UTM Zone 16N or 17N

Ellipsoid

Harrison, out of curiosity did you integrate GCPs at all? We’re doing something similar soon on a Project in Oregon that doesn’t actually need to be real-world coordinates. Its primarily for vegetation encroachment analysis and as such just needs to have roughly 5-miles of line in one analysis. Do we need any GCPs for this one?

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Sam, great question. One thing to keep in mind is with your R2A, even if you don’t need real world coordinates, you’re going to get them anyway.

Your location in PCMaster is still going to be an approximation of the base location even if you don’t know the known point coordinates. Depending on how you setup your flight segments, you may have your base within the scan of most of the point clouds.

When you capture these scans without a known point, the GPS error will move them in different directions (probably) so you’ll need to either align them to each other arbitrarily. However, if you get a known point for each base station setup in most or all of the point clouds, you’ll do less work lining them up, and they’ll be in real world coordinates as a bonus.

If you can get NTRIP corrections and a cell signal, capturing 5 - 10 road paint marks or manholes, etc should only take an hour or so. It would be worth the effort in my opinion.

That all being said, if you have no coordinates to go off of, you can just manually align each segment using folders and Compare & Merge tools to just match the first one to the next, and so on.

Hope this helps!

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You can also make sure that your base unit sits and collects data long enough to meet the requirements for an OPUS solution. just do this for every base setup and your clouds will be pretty darn close to each other even from multiple base locations. just takes a little bit of time for opus. or as Daniel said manually align in RockCloud. ideally in a 5 mile stretch you can set your base in the middle and fly as many missions as you need from that one base setup. and then it doesn’t matter if you have exact base coords or not since your looking for relative accuracy. you don’t have to stop your base just because you stop and start new missions. I have let our base run for several hours and completed several missions with in a 5-7 mile radius with no issues. yes the rinex file is a little larger but not a problem to work with. just my opinion.

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I just set my base to receive, accept all the default coords and fly away!

I just ran a test using the “I don’t care…” metrics. Makes really tight data.

Good question!

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