Recording point locations during flight and map backdrops

Icarus Daedalus · Jun 8, 2017

Hi all!

I'm brand new here so please be gentle! I've done some searching and can't find what I'm looking for so hopefully someone on here can help. I want to use my Mavic to rapidly survey fields for presence/absence of livestock. It's to speed up and target field surveillance in the event of a serious disease outbreak in animals. I have all the farm locations as polygons with associated IDs in a GIS but I want to overlay them over the DJI pilot map (or third party app if required). I can export the farm polygons into Google Earth as KML or KMZ but I don't know how to bring these maps into the pilot map? Ideally, I would like to be able to record a point location as I fly over it so each field could be assigned a 'Yes' or a 'No' for presence or absence of livestock. This point file could be overlaid on the farms file in the GIS after the flight. Has anyone done anything like this before?!

Thanks (and apologies if this has been asked before)!

rnaiyc · Jun 12, 2017

This might be a helpful video for you. Litchi is a paid for app that you can fly with that has some features DJI GO doesn't.

Icarus Daedalus · Jun 12, 2017

Thanks Rnaiyc! I had seen this. It's just for preparing a flight path. I really want to be able to overlay a KML or KMZ file over the map in the pilot view. I also want to be able to record waypoints during the flight. I guess it's not possible! There must be a market for it! Even the earliest generation handheld GPS system had a MOB (Man overboard) button which records a position that can be returned to.

beachcombing · Jun 12, 2017

Maybe ESRI's Drone2Map software will do what you seek.

Drone2Map for ArcGIS

It's based on this software. Generate 2D and 3D information, purely from images with Pix4D

dwallersv · Jun 12, 2017

Not exactly the solution you're looking for, but you can pretty much do what you want offline by importing the KML into Google Earth on a PC, place waypoints where you want them relative to your grid, export the waypoints as KML, import into Litchi, finish up the mission parameters and settings.

There are several threads over on PhantomPilots addressing this workflow. Of course, this is all off-line, pre-planning. I don't know of any way to overlay a map or other dataset onto the maps live while flying.