Generally, there are 3 main types of control for unmanned aircraft flights which are manual flight, static flight plan, and dynamic flight plan. The manual flight control had been done in the previous activities. Here in this section, we will concentrate more on the static flight plan.
Since one of the good ways to study the static flight plan is the simulation, we start with it.
After starting the simulation in Mission Planner, we are able to organize our own static flight plan for our mission. In our case, the mission is a ground survey.
The first thing we have to do is to choose a take-off point. We don’t need a position for take-off. Only the important thing to consider is take-off altitude. It has to be higher enough to have clearance for obstacles such as trees and buildings in the area.
How to start the planning is shown below.
The second step is shown below. In this step, we have to select a polygon where we want to do the survey.
What we have to do next is to generate waypoints automatically as grid.
After the step above, a new window pops up for the configuration of the grid of the survey. Here, we can change some parameters and choose cameras so that we are able to organize a more efficient flight plan.
In our mission, we choose Canon S110 as our camera. As shown below, these camera and altitude settings can change the distance between the waypoints based on the camera parameters such as focal length, sensor size, and lenses. By doing so, with the higher altitude, we do have a more efficient mission.
There is another interesting setting in this window which is “Angle”. When the survey grid configuration window pops up, this angle is set automatically along the longer side of the selected area. But we can change this angle. For example, let us say there is wind along the longer side of the area. In this case, the automatically chosen angle is not good for our final mission result due to the wind. Therefore, as shown in the image below, we can change the angle as we want. But in our case, we did not use the one below.
Then, once the setting is done, we click “Accept” to finish the setting. After that, we can see the automatically generated waypoints and their corresponding actions to do (in our mission, it is taking photos).
Now, what we have to do is to save (If you want) and write the static flight plan to the autopilot (In this case, to the simulator).
Finally, it is time to execute the simulation. To do so, we must set the settings below, arm the vehicle and start it by hitting “Do action”.
The screenshot of the completed mission is shown below. Here we can also see where the photos are taken and how the photos could be overlapped as red lines.
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