faith_lopez48•3d agoMost Upvoted

PSA: Stop trusting auto-takeoff on your drone mapping software

I've been flying drone surveys for a construction site outside Denver for about 6 months now. Kept getting these weird gaps in my orthomosaic maps and couldn't figure out why. Turns out the auto-takeoff feature in my flight planning app was launching the drone before the GPS had a full lock. That was causing the first 15-20 images to be off by like 8 feet in positioning. I caught it after 4 flights of bad data and a $200 redo of a foundation layout. Has anyone else had to disable auto-takeoff to get clean RTK data?

2 comments

2 Comments

johnson.ryan3d ago

That RTK drift cost me two full site surveys before I figured it out.

jesseb203d ago

Jumped in to say yep, same thing happened to me on a farm survey in Nebraska. Lost a whole day of perfect flying weather because the first 30 images were all shifted weird. I started putting a 2-minute delay on the auto-takeoff after the app says GPS is ready, just to be safe. Also switched to manually starting the cameras now right after the first waypoint instead of from launch. That RTK drift is nasty even with a strong lock sometimes, your mileage may vary but it's worth checking the logs every time now.