Scan patterns for survey and search
Scan patterns are particularly useful for ensuring that entire area is given complete visual or photographic coverage, as when creating photomosaics.
Here's a video showing uThere Ground control as it is used to run an agricultural photosurvey mission: [See the video]
Here's a video showing how scan parameters are changed from defaults: [See the video]
Setting up the mission:
Launch Ground Control
You can create scan pattern waypoints in any mode. ("Connect", "Review", or "Configure").
Select View: Position Map
If you're not connected to a plane with GPS lock, right-click in the map area and select: Center Coordinates.... Enter the lat / lon coordinates somewhere near the area where you'd like to fly waypoints. Alternately, you can simply Zoom Out repeatedly until the world comes into view, and then pan and zoom in to the area of interest.
Pan and zoom to center the field area to you want to scan on your screen.
Right-click on ths Position Map display and select "Add Scan Area" from the pop-up menu.
Drag the outer rectangle or the polygon vertices to fit the outline to the area you wish to scan.
To fit the scan pattern to a non-rectangular area, right click and select "Add scan area vertex" to create extra segments in the outline.
To change the type of scan pattern from the default, right-click and select "Scan pattern type"
To change scan pattern parameters such as altitude and overlap, select View: Waypoint / scan pattern properties. [see the video]
Scan direction:
This is the direction in which you want the rows to progress on the first pass, not the direction flown along the actual row. So, for a north/south pattern starting from the east side of the field going to the west, you'd enter 270.
Camera field of view:
Edit if your camera doesn't have a 50 degree field of view. You can skip this if you're just going to specify "distance between rows" explicitly.
Distance between rows:
or
Visual Coverage:
The percentage reflects how many times on average a given point is photographed. See "Scan pattern visual overlap".
To conduct the mission:
If you have a uThere transceiver, you can simply right-click and select "Fly to first waypoint".
If you don't have a transceiver, you can create a file to be loaded onto the SDFlash chip:
Right click: Waypoint File: save....
make sure that "Uthere binary waypoint file to load into Ruby (*.utwpb)" is selected at the bottom of the screen.
Note where you save the file.
Then, you can drag that ".utwpb" file into the "ruby" directory on the SDFLash chip.
Ruby will follow that waypoint pattern when you engage waypoint mode. This can be done by flipping the mode switch to and from the "autonomous" position 7 times.
**** Make sure you only have one .utwpb file present in the "ruby" directory. I'm not yet supporting the "auto-decide" function discussed earlier. For now, if you have more than one ".utwpb" file in the "ruby" directory, one will be picked randomly when you engage waypoint mode.
** Note that by default, maximum range from home for waypoints is 1km. If greater range is desired, provide support@uthere.com with lat/lon coordinates of the region in which you would like to have unlimited autonomous range.
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