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 Missions can adapt to it.
Linked Missions
In this post, we will focus on linked missions and obstacles in Hammer, a feature that allows 2 or more missions to be automated in a single flight.
Two Solar Farms being Mapped with an Obstacle in the middle
Why link missions?
Flight Planning and automation for DJI drones can be challenging sometimes, specially when the environment is complex, full of obstacles large or small that interfere with the drone’s flight path. Onboard obstacle avoidance can help, however, it’s usually not clever enough to avoid obstacles and continue with the mission.
In such scenarios, the usual practice is to either fly the drone manually, or to architect multiple-flights by constantly landing the drone after every flight. This wastes valuable battery life on the drone, and unnecessarily extends the pilot’s time on site. When it comes to gathering quick and precise data, this is unacceptable.
How to link missions?
Linking missions in Hammer is very simple. Just draw the missions as you would and place obstacles on the map for the drone to avoid. Then with the drone disconnected, start the simulator to check the planned flight path. If everything looks ok, attach the drone and press play again to start the flight.
Here are some examples:
Two Solar Farm Inspections with a site Obstacle.
Multiple Solar Farm Mapping
Two Facade Inspections with the Building/Dome Obstacle
Multiple Facade Inspections
Two Smooth Video Captures with Tree obstacles
Multiple Aerial Video/Photography
Whilst linked missions is not a feature that you would use on every flight, just like other tools, as a professional drone pilot, it can be useful to have it in your toolbox just in case you need it.
Some Considerations
It’s possible to set the height of the obstacle and Hammer will fly the drone around the obstacle at that height. If you wish the drone to go over the obstacle instead, please get in touch and we’re happy to enable this feature for you. Lastly, the drone will head back home after the missions are complete at the set RTH (Go Home) height. Hammer ensures that the RTH (Go Home) height is always higher than the highest obstacle on the map, and therefore it might appear that the drone is breaching an obstacle on the way home, while really it is just flying over it!
Summary
And…that’s it! Now you know how to create, simulate and fly your own linked missions 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