Mavic Air Residential Block Survey

[michael skipper]

Hi from NSW south Coast in Australia
I have been learning the intricacies of my Air recently and getting reasonable proficient at flying in close quarters.
I have been requested by some homeowners who have lost their houses in the massive bushfires we had here at NYE and all of Jan this year. Most have wanted to document the site cleanup process and now i have a few wanting to use the drone service for extra info on the survey of the sites prior to any new rebuilding.
Many of these sites are very difficult, steep terrain and with burnt but still living trees dotting some of the blocks. Makes for interesting flying at lower altitude.!
I am wanting to get some ideas if anyone has used dronedeploy or similar programs for photogrammetery work with a Mavic Air as i need something to produce a 3d map of the terrain without running into trees etc.
These blocks are not big and in general would be around 100mt x 30mt with a few bigger that that (we are not talking open paddocks and field of 100 acres here....
I would appreciate advice on what would be a good program to use for this project.
Thanks

 

[pelagic_one]

G’day! Coming solely from a hobbyist’s perspective, I’ve gathered video of a criss-cross lawnmower-like pattern with Litchi, then uploaded the video to the Hivemapper site where they render the 3D video.

@Hivemapper are forum members, so they can chime in and assist, as needed.

 

[michael skipper]

Thank you - i will give these options a go in the next few days.

 

[Jordaneer]

Ideally you want to use a desktop application like metashape pro or pix4dmapper as well as ground control points from a high accuracy GPS like an emlid reach rs+ or rs2 for accurate maps (as well as you can't put property lines on a map without a surveyors license or one signing off on it or else you can get in a lot of trouble (making maps is perfectly okay as long as you don't claim to be a surveyor)

If you have steep terrain for making maps, your best bet is going to be maps made easy map pilot (only available on iOS) as it has a feature called terrain awareness where it will stay a consistent height above the ground which is a lot better for map collection vs fixed height

Otherwise you can fly at different heights but that takes longer and is less accurate (you can actually use two different apps for data acquisition and data processing, I use dronedeploys app to fly and collect the data but use adesktop app on my computer called metashape pro to process the data

If you are only flying to create maps that need to be pictures essentially, a solution like dronedeploy is probably adequate as it's only a subscription vs having to pay for a powerful computer and generally kind of expensive software (metashape pro is $3000 USD for the non-education version)

Feel free to ask more questions if you would like