PhenoFly Planning Tool: flight planning for high-resolution optical remote sensing with unmanned areal systems

BACKGROUND: Driven by a huge improvement in automation, unmanned areal systems (UAS) are increasingly used for field observations and high-throughput phenotyping. Today, the bottleneck does not lie in the ability to fly a drone anymore, but rather in the appropriate flight planning to capture images with sufficient quality. Proper flight preparation for photography with digital frame cameras should include relevant concepts such as view, sharpness and exposure calculations. Additionally, if mapping areas with UASs, one has to consider concepts related to ground control points (GCPs), viewing geometry and way-point flights. Unfortunately, non of the available flight planning tools covers all these aspects. RESULTS: We give an overview of concepts related to flight preparation, present the newly developed open source software PhenoFly Planning Tool, and evaluate other recent flight planning tools. We find that current flight planning and mapping tools strongly focus on vendor-specific solutions and mostly ignore basic photographic properties—our comparison shows, for example, that only two out of thirteen evaluated tools consider motion blur restrictions, and none of them depth of field limits. In contrast, PhenoFly Planning Tool enhances recent sophisticated UAS and autopilot systems with an optical remote sensing workflow that respects photographic concepts. The tool can assist in selecting the right equipment for your needs, experimenting with different flight settings to test the performance of the resulting imagery, preparing the field and GCP setup, and generating a flight path that can be exported as waypoints to be uploaded to an UAS. CONCLUSION: By considering the introduced concepts, uncertainty in UAS-based remote sensing and high-throughput phenotyping may be considerably reduced. The presented software PhenoFly Planning Tool (https://shiny.usys.ethz.ch/PhenoFlyPlanningTool) helps users to comprehend and apply these concepts.