HMArnold
Second Officer
Flight distance : 24012 ft
United States
Offline
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I've been using Ultimate Flight now for over 6 months, well over 200 autonomous flights with 2 Phantom Pro 3 platforms.
Besides the ability to create your own missions within the app, this app does allow you to create your own missions on any computer as CSV files, then load an fly them with Ultimate Flight.
This capability allows you to create very complicated flights for tasks like capturing images to create 3D models and orthophotos in Agisoft Photoscan.
The reason I first chose to use this app was that the technical support is immediate and knowledgeable. It is very rare to see a question asked without an informed answer the same day.
With Ultimate Flight I have flown agricultural survey missions of up to 300 acres on a single battery that align properly to an orthophoto in Photoscan. I have used it to complete wildlife surveys over forests, islands, and open areas.
Here is a link to the Ultimate Flight Forum where I posted a mission to do a volume calculation on a large storage area with various piles of asphalt and aggregate:
https://groups.google.com/forum/ ... antom-3/_ciqotPMK70
To get the required 3D resolution, this mission required orbit waypoints, several legs where the platform was flying sideways to keep the camera facing towards the target, altitude changes, as well as camera gimbal changes.
The app supports importing recent orthophotos to use as the Google Earth background for missions where the image available on Google Earth is not recent enough to show the structures and hazards in a given area. T
Every mission flown with the app records it's own flight log file that is immediately available for use in CSV format. These flight log files can be opened in any spreadsheet program and show the normal values of Lat, Lon, GPS Altitude, Height Above Ground, speed, distance, as well as Pitch (gimbal angle), Roll, and Yaw (platform heading) that I use to increase the accuracy of Photoscan camera alignment.
Ultimate flight also hosts interactive panorama results for free
Here is an example:
http://kenargo.com/AndroidApps/U ... 0001%20Panorama.htm
As with any emerging technology, Ultimate Flight is evolving daily, so I keep one tablet/platform combination on a older, stable version that I fly for complex missions, than another that I use to help test new versions as they are released.
With Ultimate Flight you can define a mission that flies by itself from auto-takeoff to auto-landing.
I have significant experience with the S1000+/A2/PC Ground Station system, and Ultimate Flight is so much better and easier to use that I don't use my S1000+ any more unless I want to fly my NDVI camera.
Ultimate Flight makes Phantom platforms into photogrammetric workhorses.
Hank
Texas
HMArnold@msn.com
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