Hi folks, I couldn’t find a large enough community about drones so I’ll ask here.

What I’m looking for is a programmable drone with an okay camera that can charge itself while landed.

What I want to do is: I’d like to make a time lapse video of a larger area (few acres). So the drone needs to fly a pre-programmed pattern to take pictures of the ground surface (at least once a day) that I can stitch together into a single (very large) picture and eventually a video. It must be able to charge (maybe wirelessly using Qi) while landed.

The control software doesn’t need to run on the drone itself, but I’d prefer it if possible. The picture/video processing will happen on another device.

There are probably options to modify a drone to make wireless charging possible for the ones that don’t support it by design. Or maybe a contact-based setup where the drone slips into the charger while landing.

I found a few things online but mostly very expensive professional grade stuff. Has anyone done something similar already?

I’m willing to modify a drone and write the software (and release it all under a FOSS license). I’m just looking for a good starting point like a consumer-grade drone with an SDK and a (possibly DIY) charging solution.

Cheers!

  • @tbe
    2•1 year ago

    Not sure if that helps your research. We have an (very expensive “upper 4 digit region” they didn’t tell me exactly) DJI drone (an Matrice 30T if I remember correctly) at work that has the option of operating autonomously with a base-station where it also automatically lands and recharges. The catch is it’s like impossible to operate autonomous UAVs here because of airspace restrictions (that’s why we only have the “manual” version without that base-station thingy). I’m not directly involved in the department that operates the drone so I don’t have more in depth insights but maybe that already helps a little.

    Fun fact, our military had to cancel a large and very expensive drone program because the drone (a little larger one tho) couldn’t get certified in European airspace (“Eurohawk” if you want to google that). So I’m not sure how easy it will be to hack something together depending where you are in the world and what restrictions say there.