DRONELIFE presents this visitor put up 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 in your business drone utility. 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 providers extra essential than ever. And even for those who’re not flying a number of drones on the similar time, exact positioning can allow you to do stuff you by no means thought attainable. 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 put up processing.
What’s RTK?
Usually, drones depend on world navigation satellite tv for pc system (GNSS) knowledge to find out their places. However GNSS might be inaccurate resulting from atmospheric interference, sign multipath, and satellite tv for pc orbit and clock errors. Normally drones want floor management factors (GCPs)—identified factors on the bottom used to calibrate and proper their knowledge. If there aren’t any GCPs, then location accuracy can severely undergo. Submit-processed kinematic (PPK) is one other methodology for enhancing location accuracy, however solely works after the actual fact. Information is collected through the flight, however must be processed later to attain 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 appropriate 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’ll be able to immediately obtain 1-3 cm positioning accuracy. In case your drones work in development planning, agriculture mapping, or infrastructure inspection, that degree of accuracy is essential.
Listed below are 5 the explanation why your drone wants RTK, and a number of the wonderful issues you are able to do when you’ve gotten 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. Which means you’ll be able to spend extra time accumulating the information you want, and fewer time establishing GCPs.
Determine 1 – Caption: Floor management factors require setup at each website vs. RTK Networks that cowl massive areas.
2. Scale back Submit Processing
In case you’re utilizing PPK, it might take hours to course of all the information you gathered from photogrammetry, LIDAR body matching, or mapping. With an RTK community, put up intensive 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 case you’re working a whole drone fleet, or simply flying in a crowded space, avoiding collisions is paramount. One slipup can value hundreds and set your undertaking again. RTK provides you the real-time positioning you have to keep away from collisions and to guard your funding. Good RTK knowledge coupled with path planning can forestall 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’ll be able to decide if there are any remaining location inaccuracies and the place they could be coming from. With Level One RTL, you’ll be able to 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 number of different location-based use instances all profit from RTK know-how.
Agriculture – Drones with RTK can ship extra correct soil well being evaluation, crop monitoring, and subject mapping knowledge. Which means 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 perfect for topographic surveys, GIS knowledge assortment, and environmental monitoring.
Inspections & Public Security – RTK-enabled drones might be an environment friendly and protected technique to assess infrastructure like dams, bridges, buildings, and energy traces. They’ll additionally play an essential function in emergency response, search and rescue, and catastrophe administration.
Building – You need to use RTK drones for website planning, monitoring progress, and ensuring that tasks comply with their blueprints. They’ll ship exact knowledge that helps cut back expensive errors, ensures compliance with rules, and enhances general effectivity.
Mining – With RTK, you should use your drone for surveying mine websites, monitoring stockpiles, and calculating the quantity of extracted supplies. They supply safer and less expensive alternate options to conventional survey strategies, particularly in hazardous environments.
Caption: Presently, Level One Navigation offers over 1,400 base stations worldwide, with extra being established on daily basis. This contains most of North America, Europe and now South Korea
RTK networks can provide your drone the precision it actually 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 nations, together with most of Europe, the US, components of Canada in addition to South Korea. Our community continues to develop on daily basis, delivering super-accurate real-time positioning knowledge that can 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 massive, distributed, and embedded purposes.
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Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, knowledgeable drone providers market, and a fascinated observer of the rising drone business and the regulatory surroundings for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles targeted on the business drone area and is a global speaker and acknowledged determine within the business. Miriam has a level from the College of Chicago and over 20 years of expertise in excessive tech gross sales and advertising for brand spanking new applied sciences.
For drone business consulting or writing, E mail Miriam.
TWITTER:@spaldingbarker
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