My drone challenge participation

This page is my contribution to the DIY Drones Trust Time Trial (T3) competition season 2, The model.

You can see rules and other entries to the link T3, The model

I decided to participate only 15 days before the end and it was my second automatic flight.
 
My config

 

  • Quadcopter from jDRONES
  • jDRONES 850KV motors
  • Esc jDRONES 20A
  • Lipo 3S 3000 mah
  • Arducopter Firmware 3.1
  • APM 2.5
  • Canon S110 with CHDK, stabilized chinese gimbal

 
 
The building choice

I am not professional and according to the french legislation the site must be outside cities for safety reasons. My Lipo life is around 5 minutes that's why the buiding must be quite small, with the sky free of trees for GPS reception.

 

The chapel is called "Notre dame de Buisante", and is situated 30 km in the North of Lyon, France.

It was builded in 1861.

 

Google Earth link

 
Mission planning

As it is a small building, my goal is to modelize the chapel with a maximum details. I used 24 waypoints and the function: "DO_SET_ROI" in Missions Planner to orient the quad between waypoints. The altitude is very low (10 meters) to minimize the pixel size. The speed is decreased to 50cm/seconds and the CHDK intervalometer is configurated to 1 second in JPEG.
The flight

The D-day the weather was auwful with fog and I haven't got enough time to make a new flight an other day. The flight is full automatic with take off, waypoints, return to launch and land. 111 photos were taken during the successful flight. The altitude was too low because the statue is not visible.

 

 

An unexpected tree

(all fingers crossed!)
 
Visual SFM
I am using Visual SFM (http://ccwu.me/vsfm/) and this free software works really great, I have never been disappointed with the result. The sparse reconstruction show the camera's position during the flight:
Sparse reconstruction:

Clic pictures to enlarge

 
Dense 3D point cloud: this is only colored points

 

Clic pictures to enlarge

 
 
CMPMVS

The outpout from VisualSfm (cameras parameters, orientation, ...) is used as input for CMPMVS (http://ptak.felk.cvut.cz/sfmservice/websfm.pl?menu=cmpmvs). The outpout is a textured mesh. I used all default parameters. The final result is shown:
Interactive 3D view:

Buisante chapel from mydrone on Sketchfab.

 
 
 
Orthophoto generated by CMPMVS:
video generated by CMPMVS (please use Firefox if video is not visible)