Unmanned Aerial Vehicle R based Mission Planning

The uavRmp package is designed for uav autonomous mission planning. 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. It belongs to the uavR package family that provides more functionality for the pre- and post-processing as well as the analysis of the derived data.

Up to now it has been dedicated to low budget rtf-UAVs (ready-to-fly-UAVs) as the DJI Phantom series and the 3DR Solo. However the current and future support will cover all Pixhawk based UAVs.

The open UAV community is focused on the PixHawk autopilot unit and the MissionPlanner or APM Planner 2 software. Both are well documented and provide APIs (Application program interface) and easy to use GUIs (graphical user interface). Nevertheless they are so far missing either planning capability (APM Planner) or a terrain following autonomous flight planning tool, that is also dealing with battery-dependent task splitting and save departures and approaches (MissionPlanner). Other groundstation software solutions like the powerful UgCS are supporting custom DEM/DSM (in the commercial Pro license) but are still lacking an adequate capability for dealing with highly complex surfaces combined with low above surface flight altitudes.

The uavRmd 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.

The reason using DJI is their absolute straightforward usage. Everybody can fly with a DJI but the price to pay is a hermetically closed system. Only the litchi app provides additionally to a cloud based mission planner an offline/standalone interface that is up to date and facilitates the upload of a CSV formatted waypoint file to control autonomous flights with the the Phantom.

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

The package family consists of 4 parts:

• flight planning uavRmp
• forest analysis uavRfa
• remote sensing uavRrs
• archaeology uavRao

Please note that uavRmp is making strong use of CLI tools like GDAL. The setup of the correct linkage to these APIs can be cumbersome. For using the uavRmp package you need to install the link2GI package. Because the CRAN version is a bit outdated you should get the actual github hosted version of the link2GI package.

Nevertheless, all mentioned software packages have to be installed correctly on your OS. It is just in parts tested under Windows but should run....The easiest way to obtain a fairly good runtime enviroment is to setup Linux as a dual boot system or in a VB. If interested in setting up a clean Xubuntu or Mint Linux you can use the postinstall script for installing most of the stuff. For using some of the the Solo related functions you need to install the dronekit python libs in addition.

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

To install from github you need to have installed the devtools package.

devtools::install_github("gisma/uavRmp", ref = "master")

If you want to install all dependencies use:

devtools::install_github("gisma/uavRmp", ref = "master", dependencies = TRUE)