The uavRmp package is
designed for a light weighted uav autonomous mission planning including
full documentation capabilities. In the first place it is a simple and
open source planning tool for monitoring flights of low budget drones
based on R. It provide an easy workflow for planning
autonomous surveys including battery-dependent task splitting, save
departures, and approaches of each monitoring chunks.
The majority of the open UAV community is using the PixHawk autopilot unit and for planning probably the MissionPlanner or a bit more basic QGroundControl ground station software. Both are well documented and provide APIs (Application program interface) and easy to use GUIs (graphical user interface). Nevertheless both have only a poor planning support for terrain following autonomous flights (basically SRTM data) and no straightforward support for battery-dependent task splitting and save departures and approaches (MissionPlanner). Up to now the most affordable powerful UgCS software provides all of the above mentioned capabilities. However it is challenging to use especially for a fast deployment of a small local flight task as typically requested in fieldwork.
The uavRmp bridges this gap and generates
MAVLINK format compliant mission files that can be uploaded
to the Pixhawk controller using an integrated function or externally by
any Ground Control Station software.
Up to now the uavRmp package has been dedicated to low
budget rtf-UAVs (ready-to-fly) as the DJI series that are supported by
Litchi and Pixhawk based platforms
as the Yuneec UAVs or the outdated but still running 3DR Solo.
The core planning tool makeAP (make arial flight plan)
creates either intermediate flight control files for the DJI UAVs or
waypoint files for the PixHawk family. Furthermore the option
useMP unifies flight planning for PixHawk based platforms
and DJI consumer drones. as it offers an easy conversion of surveys
planned with QgroundControl into the format readable by
Litchi.
NOTE: The Litchi export for DJI Consumer drones is significantly improved now. For details have a look at the vignette.
NOTE: Starting with Version 0.6.3 the
raster package is removed and you need to provide the
terra package SpatRaster format only.
NOTE: You may use now the survey planning tool of
QGroundControl or Missionplanner and convert
it either to DJI compatible Litchi format or MavLink files. Both with
safe flights to the mission start and RTH as well as task splitting. You
will find an simple GUI interface calling
shiny::runApp(system.file("shiny/plan2litchi/", "/app.R", package = "uavRmp")).
NOTE: The DJI control files are designed for using
with the proprietary Litchi flight control app exchange
format, while the PixHawk/3DR Solo files are using the
MAVLINK common message format, that is used by the PixHawk
flight controller family.
You need GDAL to be installed. For using some of the the 3DR Solo related functions you need to install the python libs in addition.
To install the most actual version do it from github you
need to have installed the devtools package.
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("gisma/uavRmp", ref = "master")