Drone Flight Planning Math: Flight Time, Range, Wind, Mapping Overlap & Image Resolution

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the capacity and cell count on fictional battery labels into pack voltage and watt-hours, keep the landing reserve from the operations manual aside and work out how many packs a mapping mission needs.
• Turn usable watt-hours and the average power draw into flight minutes, add the fictional power cost of extra payload, chart flight time against payload and work out the largest payload that still meets the target flight time.
• Work out the ground speed with and against the wind, the time and energy for a round trip to an inspection site in five wind scenarios and flag the scenarios in which the trip no longer fits the usable energy of one pack.
• Turn the energy left after the work at a site into the farthest out-and-back distance in the given wind, look up the sight limit from the fictional operations manual, take the stricter of the two and flag the sites that are too far away.
• Work out how many centimetres of ground one pixel covers for three fictional cameras, the width of ground one photo shows, the altitude that gives the client's target resolution and whether that altitude is within the client brief.
• Turn the GSD and image size into the ground footprint of one photo, apply the front and side overlap from the client brief, and work out the line spacing, the photo interval, the number of flight lines and the total number of photos for the quarry.
• Compare three grid options for the same quarry: flight path length, time on the grid including the turns, the number of batteries when each pack also has to fly to the grid and back, and the total time the crew spends on site.
• Compare the planned flight with the fictional limits of Kestrel's operations manual and the client brief, give every check a Red, Amber or Green flag (also for a limit where more is better), let one formula take the decision and colour the red flags.