Taking photos - moving between spots is slowww

General Discussion
#1

Perhaps I’m just impatient, but I’ve created a photo waypoint mission, with the following settings:

Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 19.26.10
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And the speed the drone uses to transfer from one spot to another is - best guess - 5km/h, not 50, especially when going up or down.

What am I missing? The points are perhaps 10m between each other, so I can imagine it won’t reach 50km/h without hugely overshooting, but it really takes its sweet time. Is there any setting I’m overlooking? Should I not be as greedy and set it to eg 25km/h?

As a very rough approximation, of my gut feel of ‘5km/h’ - the drone takes 10 photos in 3 minutes. Assuming 10m distance between shots it takes 18 seconds between shots, which is roughly 2km/h … zzzzzzz

#2

Hello @Marten_van_Wezel ,
What is the Speed setting for your Waypoints? If they are set to anything other than ‘Cruising’ the speed will override the Cruising Speed that you show in your Mission Settings.

#3

Good point for me to doublecheck - but yes it’s set to “cruising” - which therefore is 54km/h?
Surely there’s no central setting I’m missing?

#4

Asuming you are still using your Mini 2:
According to the specification of the Mini 2 it’s maximum theoretical speed in object avoidance & position mode is 10m/s (not 15m/s).
Furthermore the drone has to accelerate and decelerate.
So the shorter the distance between these 2 points the lower the average speed will be.

#5

Yup, but well, 2 km/h is very very slow. I don’t exactly know how litchi team built the accelleration curve to “hit the exact spot” but somehow I think it’s not doing things very right. I suppose it works but if I would be a semi skilled drone flyer (am not) I bet I could take the 10 pictures in ‘sport’ mode within 1m and litchi takes 3m…

I’ll try manually setting the speed to perhaps 15km/h, see if that helps

#6

Turn on “curve turns”. And enable 0.5s photography interval

#7

It’s like this

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#8

Not a bad solution, but I’m trying to take exactly the same shot every time, so I have to fly from position to position. And, the actions can’t be done in curved turn mode.

1 Like
#9

What drone are you using?

#10

Drone is a DJI mini 2

#11

If you climb or descend by a while over a short distance in the x-y plane (like 10m) as you might say, speed is limited by the ascent (or descent) capacities of the drone.
Did you test the mission with VLM ?

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#12

I would suggest making a ‘test mission’ and using longer distances between points. Changing as little as possible from your photo mission will help you check and see if distance is indeed the limiting factor.

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#13

I have a mission for my Mini 2 that I repeat regularly to get a series of 9 straight-down images from 105m. (I later stitch them together to make a highly detailed planar overlay for Google Earth to show a part of our property over the seasons.)

The mission’s settings have the cruising speed set to 14kph and path mode to “straight lines”, and it takes 7 minutes to cover 543m (only part of which is capturing the 9 images). Each of the 9 image capture waypoints is 26.1m apart, and have speed=4kph, altitude=105m, with gimbal as interpolated and -90°. I’ve repeated this mission many times, and even with some fairly stiff breezes and at temperatures as low as -25C, the resulting planar overlays have been extremely consistent.

Others have asked about your 54kph speed… While that appears to be the maximum speed allowable in the Litchi Mission tool, I doubt if a Mini 2 would ever achieve that — and even if it did, taking a picture at high speed would be problematic. When I need very accurate positioning for photos, I set a “Stay For=3 sec” action before adding a “Take Photo” action for the waypoint to give the Mini 2 some time to stop and orient correctly.

#14

This seems to be my experience too. 543m in 7 minutes is obviously super slow, and in the same ballpark of what I’m noticing. While of course I’m not expecting my 200m trip to take (0.2/54)*60 = 0.18 minutes I’m convinced that this speed can be pushed up easily without any negative impact to quality.

As @Eric_Fletcher suggested, adding the 3second pause is needed (still not sure if we need to do before and-or after). My drone, especially in sport mode, will ascend/descend MUCH faster than it does in this mode.

#15

Do you need the speed for any particular reason? For my mission, each of the 15 waypoints has a 3-second wait time before taking the photo. I have it running in Sport mode, but for a programmed mission like this, I’m more interested in having it reliably repeatable than running fast & risking having the pictures less accurately positioned. For some other missions where I need to get to the area of interest up to 400m across a field, I set a fast speed, then go slow for the photos, and return at higher speed.

#16

Speeds> Just impatience - I would absolutely not want it to lose accuracy but I don’t see why traveling to the next spot at ‘max speed’ and then taking all the time it needs to stabilise is not an option. More specifically I don’t see why it’s not doing everything as speedy as humanly (drone-ly?) possible as long as accuracy is maintained.