Overview
Hammer Missions is a drone flight planning and 3D mapping software platform designed for the commercial drone industry. We support a large number of mission types on both mobile tablets through Hammer App and web-based environments through Hammer Hub.
Whether it's inspection, mapping or 3D models, Hammer can adapt to it.
Tutorial
In this tutorial, we will focus on linear inspections — 1 of the 3 inspection missions supported by Hammer:
Horizontal Inspection — of buildings, roofs, and other infrastructure.
Linear Inspection — of pipelines, railroads, rivers and other linear objects.
Vertical Inspection — of building walls, cliffs and other vertical structures.
Linear Inspection
This type of inspection is useful for surveying gas pipelines / railroads and other resources that appear linear in geometry from a height, rivers for instance.
In this mission, Hammer calculates picture points on top of a user-defined line and flies the drone to these points maintaining a constant altitude throughout the mission. The drone stops at every point in the mission, adjusts its heading to match the line’s heading and takes a high resolution picture of the linear structure.
Steps to Create
Tap on the add(+) button in the top right corner.
Choose ‘Linear Inspection’ from the missions view
Draw a line over the area to be inspected.
Note: A line can also be drawn by flying the drone to the appropriate GPS coordinates and tapping the back (right) button on the remote controller.
4. Once you are happy with the line, click OK on the right panel.
This will generate a dotted string of points on top of the line.
Creating a Linear Inspection Mission
Steps to Configure
Tap on the white gear icon on the line mission you wish to configure, which will open a settings menu.
Use the settings menu to configure the mission settings.
Configuring a Linear Inspection Mission
Brief description of the available settings:
Altitude: Flight altitude for all generated points (blue dots) in the mission.
Image Overlap: The % of overlap between any images on the line.
Steps to Simulate
Once you are finished creating and configuring the mission, simply press play button in the right panel.
If no drone is connected, Hammer will prompt you to add a simulator, press OK and choose a home location for the simulation. Then press OK.
The simulation will begin and you’ll see a simulated drone appear on the screen flying the linear inspection mission.
Steps to Fly
Once you are happy with the created mission, simply connect your drone to Hammer through the USB port on the remote controller.
You’ll see a drone icon appear on the screen at its current location.
Press Play to start the mission.
Press Pause anytime to pause the mission, and play to resume the mission.
Post Processing
Once you've collected the data, we recommend using Hammer Hub - our data inspection platform to sift through the images and annotate your findings. If you'd like to learn more about data processing options, please feel free to get in touch with us at team@hammermissions.com.
Summary
And…that’s it! Now you know how to create, simulate and fly your own linear inspection mission in Hammer.
If you currently do not have access to Hammer Missions, you can get started over here.
If you’d like to learn more about other missions supported in Hammer, including facade inspection, tower mapping and more, please visit our mission tutorials.
If you're interested to learn more about our enterprise solutions, including mission collaboration, flight analytics and more please contact us at team@hammermissions.com.
We look forward to hearing from you.
- The Hammer Team