Using Measure Ground Control

 Introduction

Measure Ground Control (MGC) is software that pairs with your drone and allows you to plan and carry out automated missions in a simple and safe way. It pairs with any DJI aircraft and allows for any and all missions one can plan. It also allows one to look into airspace maps of the area and ensure safety compliance for the flight, as well as allows you to edit all the little details of the flight to get the data just how you want it. Within the front page of the app you have 4 options; Airspace, settings, fly, and flight plan. Airspace as mentioned before allows you to check airspace around your area, settings allow you to change different things like maximum allowed flight altitude. Fly allows one to fly the aircraft just like they were in the traditional DJI app, and a flight plan is where you can plan and launch automated missions from.

Figure 1: The homepage of the App

Grid Missions

Grid missions are useful for taking many images over a large area like a field or building if you use crosshatch. This gives you many images along a grid for you to then load into other software to stitch it all together into one large image. This has many uses from making maps to measuring volume. Within the planning, you get a satellite view so you can use landmarks to help plan the flight. Here you also set the altitude and other settings that will be touched on later.

Figure 2: A planned Grid Mission

Waypoint Missions

Waypoint missions are useful if you need a series of images in a line or similar fashion. This would be perfect for pipeline or powerline inspections where you fly the aircraft along in a typically straight line. Also because this is a straight line you can adjust specific events to occur between 2 points, like start video or raise altitude.

Figure 3: A Waypoint Mission

Settings

Within the settings tab, there are many different options. From the homepage, there is one settings page that handles generic settings like max altitude, imperial or metric measurements, gimbal, and compass calibrations. There is also another set of settings for specific automated flights like altitude or overlap or the speed of the flight. All of these settings can impact the speed of the flight as if the drone is higher up it can seem more, so it needs fewer laps. Or the overlap where more overlap will require more laps as the images need to be closer to one another.

Conclusion

MGC is a great app, it allows just about anyone to be able to gather data that they want. All that comes next after the data is gathered is that it is processed then there is a finished product. By keeping the app as simple as it allows the end-user to be able to understand and get to flying as quickly as possible. The app does have some drawbacks being that it is unstable and can crash sometimes but with waypoint flights, it isn't that big of a deal as it downloads the route before the flight commences.