Drone Harmony Mission Planner - Beta released!

[guest112]

Dear Mavic Pilots,

We enjoy the fruitful discussions on the mavic pilot forums!

We are Martin, Gil, David and Jeannine, the Swiss/Israeli team of Drone Harmony. In the last few years we have been working on a flight planner app that addresses many of the problems drone pilots face today. Finally, we have just released the beta of the app for Android devices. We invite you to try it! Currently supported drones are Phantom 4, Phantom 4 Pro and Mavic. Support for Phantom 3 and Inspire will follow soon.

Some of the features that are unique to Drone Harmony’s Mission Planner include:

• A unique scene-centered workflow:
  
  
  
• A full 3D environment.
  
  
• Automatic smoothing of flight plans and gimbal movements:
  
  
  
• Generated flight plans are optimized for accuracy and flight time and can be adjusted easily in any way.
  
  
• Reduce obstacle avoidance to obstacle drawing and let Drone Harmony compute optimal flights around them.
  
  
• Constant relative ground distance for better 3D models and orthomosaics.

As such, Drone Harmony generates flight plans perfectly suited for many professional use cases.

We invite you to visit our Drone Harmony Website and Drone Harmony Blog to see a demo video or screenshots. There you‘ll also find more information about the unique scene-centered workflow, the key features, the flight plan types and the recording modes. Or why not download the app from Google App Store for free and try it out?

We would be very grateful and happy to get your feedback on our app.

Best Regards,

The Drone Harmony Team

 

[msinger]

I like the workflow for capturing the photos. Is this software supposed to be used to create 3D models? Or is it just for helping one line up the needed shots?

 

[Capra Vecinului]

Hi, thanks for letting us know about your product!

Would love to see some 3D models created with the software (browsed through your internet site but was not able to find some samples).

 

[guest112]

I like the workflow for capturing the photos. Is this software supposed to be used to create 3D models? Or is it just for helping one line up the needed shots?

The software facilitates the gathering of high quality aerial imagery with your drone. For example we consider the shape of a building to optimize where the drone should fly and which yaw and gimbal angle it should use and you will not have to do any waypoint planning yourself.

After a flight you will have a collection of images & videos. From that point on you will have to rely on image processing software (you might know Drone Deploy, Pix4D or OpenDroneMap etc.).

Hi, thanks for letting us know about your product!
Would love to see some 3D models created with the software (browsed through your internet site but was not able to find some samples).

Happy to share! We are eager to hear what other drone pilots think about our planner!
We don't show any computed 3D models on our website, as our mission planner does not provide functionality for image processing. But we did compute orthomosaics and 3D models using Pix4D, OpenDroneMap and our own image processing pipeline in order to improve the flight planning algorithms. I recommend you just give it a try yourself. For us it was so far mostly about having a very good coverage of the inspection target and a facilitated flight planning experience. We are looking forward to hear from your experience and any improvement suggestions you may have. Thanks for your interest!

 

[jpelton722]

Looks awesome, but no iOS yet?

 

[guest112]

Looks awesome, but no iOS yet?

Thank you for your interest, we are glad you like it. Unfortunately we did not have yet the time to build an iOS version. We had to focus on one platform for now. If things go right in the future we will definitely look into building an iOS version as well.

On a side note: We saw from the discussions here that many users had stability issues with Android and DJI. We did put in a lot of effort to make our mission planner stable on Android, give it a try.

 

[JoostGT3]

Looks very promising and well thought-through. It is mentioned that beta testing is free, Could you give an indication of the price level of the finished product?

 

[guest112]

Looks very promising and well thought-through. It is mentioned that beta testing is free, Could you give an indication of the price level of the finished product?

Thank you, happy you like it.

For future pricing we intend to offer two versions of the planner: One for the drone hobbyist and one for professionals. The hobbyist version will be priced competitively to current prices you see on the mission planner market. The professional version will offer significantly more value to what you see on today's market and thus will be priced at a higher price.

 

[DutchMavic]

Wel I think it looks really fantastic! I also joined the forum on your website. Fist question I have is.. Is it using the relative to ground functionality? I want to plan something that is in a mountain area but I don't know the heights there .

 

[guest112]

DutchMavic we are glad also the dutch seem to dig the app, thanks!

All elevations that you enter when defining the scene are relative to the absolute height of the liftoff location. Our obstacle avoidance algorithms that are included when automatically computing plans such as a site scan take the shapes and heights of drawn objects into account in two ways:
1. They make sure the flight plan avoids any of the drawn objects.
2. They optimize locations and adjust angles of camera and gimbal so that the camera view is not obstructed by obstacles. For example we would not guide your drone behind a tree when you would like to see a house. Instead we would decide to either guide your drone in front of that tree or even above that tree.

Note that integrating absolute ground elevations is one of the next features we will work on. We imagine that the hilly landscape will be visible in the app and it will allow you to use a relative to (absolute) ground distance at any point. Stay tuned, we promise you we will deliver a nice solution for this.

If you have any more questions we are always happy to answer.

 

[darana]

Looks interesting, sadly I'm on the iOS side of the fence looking in on this one. FWIW if I was running an android device, though, I'd be giving it a whirl! It looks great for pre-vis of still and video for creative purposes. There's lots of flight planners for surveying, etc, but not nearly as many robust tools for creatives.

 

[PaoloOne]

DutchMavic we are glad also the dutch seem to dig the app, thanks!

All elevations that you enter when defining the scene are relative to the absolute height of the liftoff location. Our obstacle avoidance algorithms that are included when automatically computing plans such as a site scan take the shapes and heights of drawn objects into account in two ways:
1. They make sure the flight plan avoids any of the drawn objects.
2. They optimize locations and adjust angles of camera and gimbal so that the camera view is not obstructed by obstacles. For example we would not guide your drone behind a tree when you would like to see a house. Instead we would decide to either guide your drone in front of that tree or even above that tree.

Note that integrating absolute ground elevations is one of the next features we will work on. We imagine that the hilly landscape will be visible in the app and it will allow you to use a relative to (absolute) ground distance at any point. Stay tuned, we promise you we will deliver a nice solution for this.

If you have any more questions we are always happy to answer.

I have just installed the app, nice work! I find that it would be helpful if you could allow to copy/paste the obstacles, I was trying to make a model of an area that has 6 identical buildings, drawing all of them looks like a repetitive and error prone process.

 

[guest112]

I have just installed the app, nice work! I find that it would be helpful if you could allow to copy/paste the obstacles, I was trying to make a model of an area that has 6 identical buildings, drawing all of them looks like a repetitive and error prone process.

Thank you for trying it out and we are glad you like it!

We like your idea to add a copy/paste functionality, thus we added this idea to the planned features list.

On a side note: The copy&paste function exists already for flight plans.

 

[Dragonfly]

Have been testing the new beta app Drone Harmony by AG on Android for waypoint control and mission planning and its really been good. Straight forward easy to use and well laid out app. Still in Beta and unofficially not released yet this app is real promising in that it offers 3D dimension views of your flight aera and what your camera is looking at and angle of camera before take off. You can add in waypoints, easy adjust hight, position and camera angle with ease. App allows batch waypoint manipulation as well. You can can pause a flight once in progress and alter the flight plan the resume or cancel at anytime. Set the speed and choose between six types of flight plans.
Best part is you can draw on your map all the obstacles and buildings in and around the flight plan and the app will automatically plan the flight around those obstacles. Looking forward to more on this app from this company.

 

[guest112]

Have been testing the new beta app Drone Harmony by AG on Android for waypoint control and mission planning and its really been good. Straight forward easy to use and well laid out app. Still in Beta and unofficially not released yet this app is real promising in that it offers 3D dimension views of your flight aera and what your camera is looking at and angle of camera before take off. You can add in waypoints, easy adjust hight, position and camera angle with ease. App allows batch waypoint manipulation as well. You can can pause a flight once in progress and alter the flight plan the resume or cancel at anytime. Set the speed and choose between six types of flight plans.
Best part is you can draw on your map all the obstacles and buildings in and around the flight plan and the app will automatically plan the flight around those obstacles. Looking forward to more on this app from this company.

Dragonfly hats off for grasping so many of our mission planners features this fast! We are very happy to see that people start testing the advanced features and even better when they do like it.

 

[M4rco]

Tested the app using my Huawei mate 9. amazing shot and amazing video. there are too many the feature inside to use all of them in a single flight with the Mavic. I tested it with a free ride through about 20 POI and 20 different heights. All was fantastic and the smoothing feature is awesome.

 

[SRJ_Mavic_PRO]

Too bad you picked the least popular platform for this to run on...

 

[M4rco]

Too bad you picked the least popular platform for this to run on...

I'try it with a Samsung S7 edge.

 

[dwallersv]

This looks very exciting, based just on the videos in the OP. I've downloaded it, am headed to the Sierra Nevada mountains today, and will give it a test drive over some spectacular wilderness.

One idea comes immediately to mind, though: Take a look at exporting a Google Earth tour for the planned mission that can be played in Google Earth. This would provide as realistic a simulation of the actual mission as you can get. Maybe even integrate GE directly into the app so no export is necessary -- just hit the "fly simulation" button or something.

This is a crude example of what I'm talking about: Litchi: New terrain-following workflow

 

[guest112]

Tested the app using my Huawei mate 9. amazing shot and amazing video. there are too many the feature inside to use all of them in a single flight with the Mavic. I tested it with a free ride through about 20 POI and 20 different heights. All was fantastic and the smoothing feature is awesome.

M4rco, Happy you like it! Looking forward for more feedback from you.