Title: Lesson 8: Mission Design
Course: Image acquisition using drones > Section: Course Content

This lesson describes the use of the apps for mission planning for DJI drones. There are up-to three apps for this purpose depending on if you work from an Android or iOS.
The lesson relies an sequential screenshots and tips from experienced pilots to guide you through the flight mission design. Special care is place on safety mission and very important mission settings.

Objectives:

The objective is to be in control of every detail of your mission and to be able to recover your drone in case of mission failure of unexpected (solvable) problems.

Entrance requirements:

Followed the previous lesson of this course and conducted the exercises. Availability of android and/or iOS cell phones of tablets from where the apps can be launch and studied.

Notions to be grasped:

At the end of this lesson the participant should…

- be able to establish the area to be surveyed and the type of mission.
- be able to communicate between the drone and the app in order to:
  - be able to set the geofence in height and distance.
  - be able to set photogrammetric parameters.
  - Set all pre- and post-flying options to preserve the collected data without saturating memory.
- be able to establish the adequate flying mode
- be able to get the control of the drone to bring it bak in case of necessity.

Learning activities:

- Study the PPT presentation “EENSAT_Drone_Operation_08_Mission_Design.pptx''.
- Read the operation manuals of the app software: DJI Go, Ctrl+DJI (only for android) and Pix4Dcapture as they are part of the mission planning
- Prepare exercises as described under “Tasks”

Tasks:

1. Go through the PPT and study the lesson.
2. Ask questions you did not understand but only after searching for explanatory material.
3. Make a complete design of the flight mission following a stated rubric.

Planned time frame for this lesson:

8 hours