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BacNBlak

Posted 4/11/2016 20:27 (#5237514)
Subject: My Drone Deploy Tests

Eastern Shore of MD

I thought that I would write up a post to describe my experience with using the Drone Deploy app and software. I need to make clear that this is just to share my experiences and not to promote or discourage others from using it. I am also hoping to learn some things that I could do better and to see if these are common issues or if my experiences are unique. This is my second 'trial' as I had a lot of negative results the first time I used it, about two months ago, and wanted to try it again.

I fly a Phantom 3 Pro, NO NDVI camera. I mapped all of my flights on my desktop and took off to the farms to see if I could map all of our winter wheat with 4 fully charged batteries. I use an iPhone 6 and started with approx 85% battery on it. My goals were to see just how much acreage of our shaped and sized farms I could map in how much time (including processing) it would take. So aside from just an imaging test, it was a feasibility test as to whether or not I could potentially do this for others on the side with my current setup. Wind speeds during flights ranged from none up to 10-15 mph gusts. Time of flights were between 2:30pm and 4:00pm.

One of the problems that I'd experienced during my previous flights was a lack of quality stitching on some images so to address this, I increased the altitude to 320 ft and 70% front and 70% side over lap, on the desktop. Then I loaded up, got to the farm and got ready to fly. Syncing the flights and connecting to the drone were effortless.

Mission 1: Drone takes off and ascends to only 246 feet, not the 320 I'd set on my desktop. I tried to change this manually at this point through the app to no avail so I was stuck at that altitude. The mission flew great and I got most of it done before I needed a battery swap. I swapped batteries, resumed the mission and then completed it without error. 468 images were taken total, about 72 acres of field so probably 80-85 total acres were flown.

Mission 2: This was the next field over so I landed the drone, kept it running, and just tried to select the next mission via the app. It got confused and tried to load the next mission along with the default 'create mission' square that you'd use if you were setting up a mission out in the field. I could not remedy this problem and just abandoned this field and mission, about 45 acres.

Mission 3: I shut everything down and restarted it before this mission after the glitches I'd just experienced, including the DD app. It flew good through the remainder of the second battery on the drone but I had to change it just at the end of the mission. I came back, did a swap just as before and took off again. This time, my phone was not communicating well either with the app or the drone itself. The flight telemetry would not stream as it was stuck displaying the reading from just after takeoff. The drone completed the mission but I just had to keep a close eye on it and I brought it home manually.

Mission 4: I had to drive about a mile down the road from last flights. My iPhone battery was getting low (~30%) so I did a dumb thing and once the mission was running, I turned the screen off on my phone. After seeing the drone flying the mission well, I turned the phone back on a few moments later and it said it'd lost communication with the drone. It would not reestablish. I chalked this up as stupidity on my part. I put it back in 'P' mode, brought it home and restarted everything, including the mission. It completed it without issue; 3 batteries down.

Mission 5: With a fresh battery, I flew this mission without issue. 52 tilled acres but probably closer to 65 that was mapped. This was my last planned mission so all of the wheat was flown minus the 45 acres that the mission did not load correctly.

I went home and uploaded the photos in order of the mission number. This went on without issue but there was one interesting note that I don't know how to explain. Mission 1, for instance, it took a total of 468 images between the two flights (because of batter swaps). When I went to upload them, it was only 438 images. This was the case with all of the missions - the reported number of images taken at the end of the mission differed slightly from what was uploaded online. Uploading took anywhere from 45 minutes down to 15 minutes and had to be done a mission at a time. There were no issues with the upload process.

Here are the times for processed images from begin of upload to finished product:
Mission 1: 5:00 pm - 10:00 pm ~5 hrs.
Mission 2: Aborted
Mission 3: 6:15 pm - 8:45 pm ~2.5 hrs.
Mission 4: 6:45 pm - 10:20 pm ~3.75 hrs.
Mission 5: 7:15 pm - ?? Fell asleep

Now the important stuff, the processed images. These are all .jpeg snipping tool images so if you zoom, the quality is not that good. The resolution via the website is outstanding! They are in order.

Mission 1:
Img 1: The fields flown were the 4 fields north of the airstrip; one on the right of the farm house and three on the left. There are fuzzy regions in the lower left and right corners.
Img 2: FALSE NDVI of same

Mission 2: Aborted

Mission 3:
Img 3: You can see the shadowing near the borders and the lane as well as the reflective streaking. This matches the drones east - west (almost left right as seen) flight pattern.
Img 4: FALSE NDVI of same

Mission 4:
Img 5: I thought this would be the best but turned out to be the worst. There is a house in this image somewhere but you'd never know. I'm not sure if stopping and then restarting the mission had something to do with this? The image was bad enough I didn't include the false NDVI.

Mission 5:
Img 6: This was of the one large field and the small field on the other side of the house together. Pay attention to how the borders are not trimmed in this image but ARE on the FALSE NDVI. Not sure how that could have happened.
Img 7: FALSE NDVI of same.

So what are my personal, unprofessional takeaways? Agronomicly speaking, there is some apparent streaking that I am suspecting was our local co-op spreading ammonium sulfate. I can tell by the guidance lines they used as well as we noted streaking after they'd spun it. One REALLY convenient tool on DroneDeploy is that you can measure right on the map. I was able to find 60ft spray boom variations from our sprayer.

On the DroneDeploy side, I need to play with it a lot more and contact their support team to see what they say about the issues I had. I am by NO MEANS complaining as this was a free trial and I can very easily to be to blame for some or most of the errors seen but I wanted to share my experiences as a novice, but very interested and dedicated, person's experiences were. Also, my phone was all but dead after these missions but it would have had charge to spare if it had been 100% charged.

Edited by BacNBlak 4/11/2016 20:48