Rosa Brook - Farm contour map

Contour map of 0.5m intervals created with drone imagery

Mission Summary

• Goal:  To capture drone imagery and demonstrate 0.5m contour lines on a map
• Tech: Skyray fixed wing drone, Canon S100 camera, Tower app, Drone Deploy
• Conditions: Midday, stormy
• Outcome: Producing a detailed contour map, even in difficult weather conditions, was not a problem 

For this project I wanted to demonstrate that we could capture drone imagery using the SkyRay in 'marginal' weather and that we could create a map with contour lines at a far greater level of detail than that attainable from satellite imagery.

Processed map in Drone Deploy showing elevation visualisation

We picked a good day as we had storm's rolling in from the south west. This was a little challenging but certainly not something that grounded us. We were able to quite comfortably run 2/3 of the mission and bring the SkyRay in for a landing before the next rain shower hit. This just meant that we had a chance to grab a cuppa and sit by the fire waiting for the weather to clear again. The rain left within 15min and we waited another 10min for the sun to come back out again, we needed this in order to maintain consistency with the previous imagery.

The second flight was no problems, we adjusted the flight plan  slightly in order to get an overlap with the previous flight. Again we managed to finish mapping the entire site before another rain shower came through, all up the entire mission took about 75min including the breaks in between.

Post-processing was a breeze using Drone Deploy and then small adjustments were made in QGIS to produce the contour lines. With this we were able to deliver a map of the 56 hectare site with 0.5m contour lines overlaid on the orthomosaic. Mission successful.

3D view of the 56 hectare farm that's been drone mapped 

This has been another 'drone adventure' in aerial surveying, inspection and mapping by The Aero Scout.