How to do a drone survey?
- Check before you leave the office: Check with the local authorities and the rules and regulations to make sure that one is allowed to fly the drone at the planned location. Furthermore, validate that the weather is suitable – no rain, storm etc. Check the battery of the drone as well as of the connected devices. Also make sure the memory card has sufficient space or else is emptied beforehand. Carry extra batteries or memory cards depending on the size of the survey site.
- Plan your flight: One can initiate the survey flight with the drone flight planning app on the tablet. Regarding this, tap and drag the points around the site one wants to survey or can import a KML file. Make sure one accounts for the sloppy, tall objects also the altitude differences. If required one can adjust the flight settings like altitude, ground sampling distance (GSD), flight direction and the image overlap.
- Set up your flight in the field: Throughout this, one needs to unpack and assemble the drone and check whether it is ready to take off in safe conditions. Follow the check list and validate every parameter for example the calibration of the airspeed sensor and removing the camera lid etc.
- Fly and collect images: Once the take-off button is pushed, the drone will automatically take-off and will start capturing images and will lands back where it got started. In this step, one needs to mainly check that no one is approaching the drone during the take-off or landing. Also, one needs to consider the weather condition and that it stays optimal throughout the survey mission.
- Geotag your images: After one or several flights, one must import the images to the software in order to get tag them. Geo tagging assigns geographical position to the images in a separate CSV file or in the images meta-data.