Using multiple drones to fly a single, large mission

PIX4Dmapper
1

Hello everyone,

I work with a land trust and have been using an Autel Evo II Pro 6K drone to fly mapping missions of our woodland and prairie restoration projects. We have two licensed drone pilots on staff and recently acquired a second Autel Evo II Pro 6K drone that was going to be used as a backup/training drone, but we had the idea to fly both drones at the same time. Some of the mapping missions for our larger properties were estimated to take nearly 5 hours of flight time for one drone and we are hoping that by flying both drones at the same time we could cut the total time in half.

Since both of the drones are the same model and have the same camera, would there be any issues processing the images in Pix4dMapper? We plan to fly both the drones at the same height at the same time of day with the same camera settings, but if anyone has done something similar and has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks in advance

2

Hi Natalie,
In theory you should be able to process all of your data together. In fact, you can process data from different drones in the same project. But I think the bigger issue maybe hardware limitations. If you are flying a drone for 5 hours then I would assume you will have many, many thousands of images. This could pose a problem if you do not have sufficient computing resources. I would look into merging projects so that it is a more manageable project.

I would also look into our newest product called PIX4Dmatic. It is our next generation of photogrammetry software that can handle much larger datasets than PIX4Dmapper.

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