Amateur waypoint/route planning

[clolson]

I have a question for the group here. I know that off the shelf uav systems come with ground station software that provides mechanisms to create and upload routes to your uav. We are building our own system though and don't have such software. I may sit down and hack something together, but in the mean time, are there tools are tricks other people are using to plot and create routes for their home brew systems?

I was fiddling around with the trekme.com site which allows you to draw out a path over google maps and then download the result in "gpx" format, but I ended up with 2 more waypoints than I thought I plotted and I haven't had time to go through point by point and see exactly what I got out of that site.

Are people defining routes with absolute lon/lat coordinates, or are people generally doing relative routes based on where you power on the system?

I'm also seeing that it would be useful to have some sort of automated route generation tools ... for instance, I want to cover some area with "n" meter wide swaths, generate a path with good coverage given certain constraints ... altitude, swath overlap, speed, flight duration, etc.

Being an amateur do-it-yourselfer, I haven't had a chance to see how the popular commercial systems approach path planning so I'm trying to think through what makes the most sense myself.

Thanks,

Curt.

[Tom Harper]

Curt,

I'm using a VB6 program that I cludged together. Cludged because I based it on my emulator code and did not clean up anything as I learned and progressed.

I save a Google image that is a little larger than my area of interest. I select features on the image that will become the upper left and lower right corners of my map. I make note of their coordinates in lat/lon. In photoshop I crop the image to the upper left and lower right corners I selected and size it to fit the application screen.

I use an Excel worksheet to keep track of each path I have created. The upper left and lower right coordinates are entered on the worksheet. The worksheet and the image file are given the same name.

When the VB6 program is opened it asks for the file name. It loads the image from the named file and scales it using the coordinates on the Excel worksheet. Using the mouse I click on the features I want to use for waypoints. The program draws the path on the image. When I am done it saves the image with the path as a print file and the waypoints on the Excel worksheet.

Since I use relative points they are saved as x,y feet from the lower right corner. I can also click on a screen button and the waypoints are downloaded to the micro in the airplane using the RS232 com port.

If it is of use, I will email a copy to you.

Tom

[clolson]

Curt,

I'm using a VB6 program that I cludged together.

If it is of use, I will email a copy to you.


That's exactly the sort of thing I'd like to be able to do. Do you have a Linux version? :-)

Curt.

[Tom Harper]

Curt,

Sorry, I don't even know how to spell Linux. I use VB because it's simple and it works.

I posted a couple of screen shots above.

Tom

[clolson]

Curt,

Sorry, I don't even know how to spell Linux. I use VB because it's simple and it works.

I posted a couple of screen shots above.

Tom

Looks nice, I only mentioned Linux because it's simple and it works. :-)

I tried VB once and had a whale of a time trying to get it to do anything. Guess my brain must be hardwired some screwy way ... at least that's what my wife tells me. :-)

But sure, if you send me a copy, I should be able to hunt around and find a windows computer here someplace that I can borrow temporarily.

I've got a couple other ideas too ... there's supposedly some nasa site that will serve out landsat imagery ... you just craft a custom url that specifies the lon/lat area and the resolution in pixels that you want. It would be fun to develop an app that can automatically pull in the background imagery for what ever area you are zoomed in on. I've got the start of a moving map application already written in perl-tk so I was thinking I might have a go at adding the ability to click and drag waypoints and then if I could automatically pull in background imagery too that might end up being really slick ...

But, I hate to reinvent the wheel if it's already been done ...

Curt.

[Tom Harper]

Will the PC have VB6 installed?

Tom

[clolson]

Will the PC have VB6 installed?


Were you planning to send a .exe or the source? It might be difficult to find a PC around here with a VB development environment installed. If you sent both the source code (I assume this would be some sort of text file???) and a .exe then I could run it and look at the code too ... I don't think I would need to compile it myself.

Thanks,

Curt.

[Munin]

Hello Curt

Funny that you where asking this question.
Because I was looking for the same a few days ago and ran into this.
Lucky I bookmarked it.

I think this might be worth looking into.

http://freegeographytools.com/2007/exporting-data-from-google-earth-to-a-gps-unit

The trick is just to draw a simple line and the adjust the waypoints afterwards. (right click for properties then you see them waypoints)
Its a clever workaround with google earth and you just need a KML to Excel waypoint extracter.

Good luck

/Munin

[vector_vortex]

If it helps I am working on some java route planning software. It is intended to act as a ground station monitor for my project. However the most functional code is successful at downloading and stitching together google maps imagery based on lat long. soon it will be able to preserve/calculate lat/long that will be sent to the flying system. My focus is on real time route planning Though I'm sure non-real-time can be supported. It is still extremely pre alpha but I would be happy to share the code so long as it doesn't make it's way into any commercial software.

Curt. As I was developing the code I was thinking how good it would be if it could be integrated into Flight Gear's terrasync code to retreive the tiles from google maps. Though I am unsure about the legality and have limited experience in working in group open source software. Let me know if you want to look at the code.

Cheers

Joel

[clolson]

If it helps I am working on some java route planning software. It is intended to act as a ground station monitor for my project. However the most functional code is successful at downloading and stitching together google maps imagery based on lat long. soon it will be able to preserve/calculate lat/long that will be sent to the flying system. My focus is on real time route planning Though I'm sure non-real-time can be supported. It is still extremely pre alpha but I would be happy to share the code so long as it doesn't make it's way into any commercial software.

Curt. As I was developing the code I was thinking how good it would be if it could be integrated into Flight Gear's terrasync code to retreive the tiles from google maps. Though I am unsure about the legality and have limited experience in working in group open source software. Let me know if you want to look at the code.


Pulling out google map imagery so it can be reused sounds like an attractive idea, but FlightGear is a very public and well known project, and I know that google has shutdown other people attempting to do similar things. So unfortunately, unless we can some how get google to give us permission to do this, it's off limits for us. :-(

Curt.