5 Causes Your Drone Wants RTK

DRONELIFE presents this visitor publish by Mark Wilkerson, Product Supervisor at Level One Navigation, offering a centimeter-accurate positioning system. On this piece, Mark lays out the explanations that RTK is likely to be proper on your business drone software.  DRONELIFE neither accepts nor makes fee for visitor posts.  

The 5 Causes Your Drone Wants RTK

By Mark Wilkerson, Level One Navigation Product Supervisor

 There are extra drones within the sky than ever, and that makes exact location companies extra necessary than ever. And even in the event you’re not flying a number of drones on the similar time, exact positioning can allow you to do belongings you by no means thought potential. Actual-time kinematic (RTK) positioning provides your drone centimeter location accuracy with out the necessity for floor management factors (GCPs) or time-consuming post-flight publish processing.

What’s RTK?

Usually, drones depend on world navigation satellite tv for pc system (GNSS) knowledge to find out their places. However GNSS may be inaccurate as a result of atmospheric interference, sign multipath, and satellite tv for pc orbit and clock errors. Normally drones want floor management factors (GCPs)—recognized factors on the bottom used to calibrate and proper their knowledge. If there aren’t any GCPs, then location accuracy can severely endure. Submit-processed kinematic (PPK) is one other technique for enhancing location accuracy, however solely works after the actual fact. Information is collected in the course of the flight, however must be processed later to realize higher accuracy.

RTK does what it says within the identify: Offers real-time positioning knowledge. Drones with RTK talk with a community of put in base stations that right GNSS knowledge. How does RTK work? The RTK community can compensate for issues like atmospheric disturbances, satellite tv for pc clock inaccuracies, and orbital errors. With RTK, you may immediately obtain 1-3 cm positioning accuracy. In case your drones work in building planning, agriculture mapping, or infrastructure inspection, that stage of accuracy is essential.

Listed here are 5 explanation why your drone wants RTK, and a number of the superb issues you are able to do when you could have centimeter-level positioning accuracy.

1. No Extra Floor Management Factors

Many drone operators arrange GCPs or base stations for extra correct positioning. RTK networks make these GCPs pointless. Simply arrive at a website, launch your drone, and fly. The RTK community will give your drone all the information it must calculate exact location immediately in actual time. Meaning you may spend extra time gathering the information you want, and fewer time organising GCPs.

 

 

Determine 1 – Caption: Floor management factors require setup at each website vs. RTK Networks that cowl giant areas.

2. Scale back Submit Processing

In the event you’re utilizing PPK, it may take hours to course of all the information you gathered from photogrammetry, LIDAR body matching, or mapping. With an RTK community, publish in depth processing isn’t wanted—you get high-precision positioning knowledge from the beginning. On common, RTK–enabled drones cut back post-processing time by about 90%.

3. Keep away from Collisions

In the event you’re working a whole drone fleet, or simply flying in a crowded space, avoiding collisions is paramount. One slipup can price 1000’s and set your challenge again. RTK provides you the real-time positioning you might want to keep away from collisions and to guard your funding. Good RTK knowledge coupled with path planning can stop collisions earlier than they occur.

Determine 2: RTK simplifies path planning.

4. Get Detailed Flight Historical past

RTK can provide you detailed flight historical past, together with timestamped places, so you may decide if there are any remaining location inaccuracies and the place they could be coming from. With Level One RTL, you may ship a single HTTPS request and obtain plain, well-informed JSON knowledge in return for any RTK-enabled drones.

5. Do Extra With Your UAV

With super-precise real-time location knowledge, you are able to do extra together with your drone than ever earlier than. Precision agriculture, volumetric measurement, inspection, and a bunch of different location-based use instances all profit from RTK expertise.

Agriculture – Drones with RTK can ship extra correct soil well being evaluation, crop monitoring, and area mapping knowledge. Meaning farmers can apply site-specific crop administration, yield extra crops, use assets extra effectively, and cut back environmental impacts.

Mapping & Surveying – RTK makes speedy knowledge assortment with excessive accuracy simile, making drones ideally suited for topographic surveys, GIS knowledge assortment, and environmental monitoring.

Inspections & Public Security – RTK-enabled drones may be an environment friendly and protected strategy to assess infrastructure like dams, bridges, buildings, and energy traces. They’ll additionally play an necessary position in emergency response, search and rescue, and catastrophe administration.

Development – You need to use RTK drones for website planning, monitoring progress, and ensuring that tasks observe their blueprints. They’ll ship exact knowledge that helps cut back pricey errors, ensures compliance with rules, and enhances total effectivity.

Mining – With RTK, you should utilize your drone for surveying mine websites, monitoring stockpiles, and calculating the amount of extracted supplies. They supply safer and cheaper options to conventional survey strategies, particularly in hazardous environments.

Caption: Presently, Level One Navigation gives over 1,400 base stations worldwide, with extra being established on daily basis. This consists of most of North America, Europe and now South Korea

RTK networks can provide your drone the precision it really must be helpful for tomorrow’s companies. Level One has over 1,400 base stations throughout the globe–offering centimeter-accurate positioning in lots of international locations, together with most of Europe, the US, components of Canada in addition to South Korea. Our community continues to broaden on daily basis, delivering super-accurate real-time positioning knowledge that may assist make drones much more helpful in our on a regular basis lives.

Mark Wilkerson is Level One’s Product Supervisor. He’s a veteran engineer & technical chief with greater than 30 years’ expertise in giant, distributed, and embedded purposes.

 

 

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