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Comment by socialismisok | Hacker News Reader

Building automation to do drone mapping.

I want to be able to make maps with an absolutely minimal amount of effort.

Hey, this is one of my projects too! I use a DJI Mini 2 along with the Litchi flight control app, which allows doing things like building up waypoint missions for covering a large area. I tried doing post-processing myself with OpenCV image stitching, but found that OpenDroneMap's NodeODM program was really nice to use and produced better results. I then wrote a program[1] to parse the output of the NodeODM results package, and upload it onto my website[2] that displays them using MapLibre.

At this point, I can lay out my waypoint missions ahead of time, grab my drone bag and some coffee, walk out the site, and get the vehicle up within a few minutes. I have three batteries, so that usually translates to somewhere around an hour of flight time with reserves, and over 100 images. When I'm done, I can pull out my computer, upload the day's images to the locally-run Docker container instance of NodeODM, wait for the results to get spit out a bit later, then run my post-process script, scp them up to the VPS hosting my site, and there's the map! The automation has made the process a lot more enjoyable. I'm still hoping to tinker with things making the images separate layers so I can do a time-series of orthophotos made in the same location, but it's still been fun in the interim. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat--I don't see many other people that are also interested in the area!

[1] https://github.com/quietlychris/odm-postprocess

[2] https://cmoran.xyz/geospatial

Nice! I use Dronelink (I'm flying an Air 2 S), and open drone map as well. But I'm mapping hundreds of acres, so I end up throwing my images into S3 and processing them on a spot instance.

I'm also working on a time series. I'll check out your projects, thanks for sharing.

Oh, interesting! I've thought about going for larger areas, but most of the places I've been interested in looking at so far (kelp forests, wetlands) are fairly small, and it's lower anxiety to do low and slow flights where I don't have to worry about local air traffic. As a result, I've tried mostly aiming at high-resolution rather than large area. Of course, that helps with the size overhead as well--my existing computing setup is almost never the bottleneck. If you end up making any of your work public, I'd definitely be interested in taking a look--I've been starting to think about larger area surveys as well.

I usually fly at 350 feet above ground level, which results in fairly good details.

I definitely recommend getting the commercial drone pilots license if you haven't already.

Gotcha--I'll have to run the numbers on pixel sizes between the Mini 2 and Air 2S at various heights; I'm sure that the Air has a much nicer camera, but it would be interesting to see how big the difference is.

I've actually got my commercial license test scheduled for the end of the month! I'm hoping that it might help me get permission to run surveys in areas like national forests or parks that are otherwise pretty much off-limits to recreational flyers.

Nice project, lots of edges to it.

- multi sensor (lidar, mag, video, multi-spectral (with calibrations(?))

- auto docking + recharging (?)

- 3D environment mapping (?), collision avoidance (?)

I spent a decade or so writing | field running geophysical mapping software.

Currently I'm mucking about 'teaching' high school kids (W.Australia) to swarm drone clouds about tractors and such things.

Plus all the orthophoto generation, tiling, and web prep to make it easy to whip out a map website quickly.

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