Newbie Needs Advise

Hi, we have used UAV Planes powered by Pixhawk in our Topographical Surveys, but the worst part of the Job is to place down Ground Control Points, which takes much longer than the Flying part. We recently did a survey for Wind Turbines at Sutherland (in South Africa) on top of the mountains which took us 3 weeks to place all the GCP…the flying part took us 2 days! We are now thinking of adding your Reach GPS in our Planes to eliminate the requirements for GCP, but have a couple of questions:

  • How accurate is your system in real-time, if the Base is set up on a known point? Is post-processing required?
  • Will the GPS system interfere with the other Electronics on the Planes?
  • Will we have to supply the GPS with it’s own Power?
  • Most processing software (Photoscan, Pix4D, etc.) can use the GPS coordinates of the Photos to stitch and generate a 3D model. How can I use the coordinates of the GPS to geo-reference the Photos automatically or is there another way to do it?
  • How long does it take once I have paid for the units to receive them in South Africa?

Regards
Michael

1 Like

Hi Michael,

I can’t answer many of your questions, but have you considered the opendronemap project here GitHub - OpenDroneMap/ODM: A command line toolkit to generate maps, point clouds, 3D models and DEMs from drone, balloon or kite images. 📷 for the stitching of geo-referenced images ?

Regards

Andy

Hi Andrew

Thanks for coming back to me. I do not have a problem with the stitching of the Aerial Photos, where I need help is how I can geo-reference my Photos with the coordinates from the Reach GPS, because once I have done that, the rest is very easy.

Regards
Michael