Planning Out Flight Line(s)
A) Use Existing Data
Existing data may be in a variety of formats, the goal at the end of the day is to generate fairly smooth (line(s)) in kml format for automating operational flight. A polygon won’t work as you can only generate a mapping mission from it.
Should lines be split up into smaller sections or just one big one?
Take into account how operators will be flying the flight lines in planning if you want to have one big line or smaller segments.
If working as a single team in the field find one longer line to be easier. You can just keep working your way down the linear sections and utilize the custom breakpoint tool of linear flight to resume at a specific location. Just important to keep track of which sections have been completed in case you accidentally cancel the flight and need to select the breakpoint to resume from yourself.
I think it is easiest to split the line into smaller assignable segments if working with multiple teams but if it is a pain to do this, could also do this when actually making missions.
How do I simplify a line and import it?
When importing a line into flight hub 2 to distribute to the remote controller for planning you can directly complete downsampling.
It is easiest to minimize the number of points and maximize the distance between them for a smoother flight, even up to something like 50 meters.
The original line can also be imported to compare and make sure you are ok with the downsampled line.
**If Pilot 2 happens to be crashing after importing the original line without Threshold, it is too much data for the RC.
Look at the difference between the two lines (green is downsampled 50m, red is downsampled 30m).
GIS Work Example:
Here is an example of how existing data could be used and prepared using QGIS a free software tool.
Original data of the fire perimeter is a Polygon
Only want to fly area within the city boundary polygon pulled from public GIS data.
Converted original fire perimeter Polygon to Line using “Polygon to Line” tool
Clipped the fire perimeter line to the area only in the city boundary with the “Clip” tool
Reprojected data so I could later split the line by distance
Simplified the line as there was way to many points for the drone to follow and software to use.
Use the "Simplify Geometries" tool in QGIS to reduce the complexity of a vector layer (like a polygon or line) by removing unnecessary vertices, while maintaining its overall shape, with a tolerance setting of 20 meters, meaning it will attempt to simplify the geometry by removing points that are closer than 20 meters to each other.
Would smooth it out more next time maybe in 40/50 meters as when you are flying you have a margin of error. Or could just use Flight Hub 2 to simplify it when importing.
Can see how small the difference is below, but the point count in this case was significantly reduced.
Ended up dissolving the line to try and combine it into one which didn’t seem to work
And split it by distance of about 2 miles each. (Split lines by distance)
From there reprojected the lines to WGS84 and exported the data as a KML
Then imported the kml to Flight Hub 2
Note: Because I clipped the polygon and it went in and out of the city boundary there were some issues and shorter segments, just ended up manually cleaning up or combining the lines in FH2.
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