OpenDroneKitWhat kinds of mission can it plan?
22 templates, each a different flight geometry. Every one has its own page with the template planned over a test site and drawn from the planner’s output.
Area surveys: Grid, Double grid, Corridor, Solar, Magnetic, Smart adaptive, Roof inspection.
Structures: Facade, Facade mapping, Multi-facade, Box, Tower, Wind turbine, Dome.
Routes and points: Orbit, Closed loop, Linear, Lateral, Waypoints, Panorama, 360 bubble, Linked mission.
How are geofences and no-fly zones handled?
Plans are laid out with real constraint geometry: ray-cast geofence containment, no-fly polygons with a detour inserted per segment, altitude bands, stand-off distance and return-to-home rules source. A waypoint that falls outside the geofence is projected back inside and the plan counts it, so a correction is never silent; the grid example on the grid page reports 5 of 85.
Terrain following works above ground (AGL) or above sea level (AMSL), with terrain from a GeoTIFF, an ESRI ASCII grid, CSV samples or a fitted plane source. Without a terrain source the plan assumes flat ground and says so in a warning on every plan.
Which cameras does it know?
11 built-in profiles with manufacturer-published sensor geometry, from which every ground sample distance, footprint and spacing is computed source:
- DJI Mavic 2 Pro (Hasselblad L1D-20c)
- DJI Phantom 4 RTK (FC6310R)
- DJI Phantom 4 Pro (FC6310)
- DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise (wide)
- DJI Mavic 3 Thermal (wide RGB)
- DJI Mavic 3 Thermal (radiometric) (thermal)
- DJI Zenmuse P1 (35 mm)
- DJI Zenmuse H20T (thermal) (thermal)
- Autel EVO II Pro
- FLIR Vue Pro R 640 (13 mm) (thermal)
- Generic 1-inch sensor
An unknown camera name is reported as unknown rather than silently given a default sensor, because a wrong sensor size changes the resolution of the whole survey. Try the geometry in the GSD calculator.
Which flight apps can fly the plan?
Six export formats, carrying gimbal pitch, heading, holds and camera triggers rather than bare positions:
- QGroundControl .plan for QGroundControl
- ArduPilot .waypoints (QGC WPL 110) for Mission Planner, QGroundControl, MAVProxy
- DJI WPML .kmz for DJI Pilot 2, DJI FlightHub 2
- Litchi CSV for Litchi Mission Hub
- KML and GeoJSON for QGIS, Google Earth and any GIS
Related
Other parts of the pipeline: Flight over MAVLink · Photogrammetry · AI defect detection · Measurements · Reports · Offline and private