Unmanned Aerial Vehicle R based Mission Planning - uavRmp

The uavRmp package is designed for a lightweighted 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.

Introduction

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.

Supported UAV platforms

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to low budget rtf-UAVs (ready-to-fly) as the DJI series that are supported by Litchi and Pixhawk based platforms as the outdated but still running 3DR Solo.

The core planning tool makeFP (make flight plan) creates either intermediate flight control files for the DJI UAVs or ready to upload control files for the 3DR Solo.

NOTE: The DJI control files are designed for using with the proprietary Litchi flight control app exchange format, while the 3DR Solo files are using the MAVLINK common message format, that is used by the PixHawk flight controller family.

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")).

Installation

The easiest way to obtain a fairly good runtime enviroment is to setup Linux as a dual boot system or in a VB. For using some of the the Solo related functions you need to install the python libs in addition.

A full list of necessary libraries and binaries beyond R will soon be provided.

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")