Aerial Search & Detect with Hammer

Overview

Hammer is an adaptive flight automation platform the commercial drone industry. We support a large number of mission types on both mobile tablets through Hammer App and Desktop environments through Hammer Hub.

Whatever your use-case, Hammer can adapt to it.

Tutorial

In this tutorial, we will focus on the search mission — 1 of the many missions supported by Hammer.

Aerial Search

This type of mission is useful for search and rescue operations that follow a specific search pattern.

In this mission, Hammer generates a spiral search pattern in the user defined shape, and flies the drone continuously to follow the generated pattern.

Steps to Create

1. Tap on the add button (+) in the top right corner.
2. Choose ‘search’ from the missions view
3. Draw a shape over the area to be searched.

Note: A shape 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 shape, click OK on the right panel. This will generate a spiral flight plan in the drawn shape.

Spiral Search Pattern using Hammer

Steps to Configure

1. Tap on the white gear icon for the mission you wish to configure, which will open a settings menu.
2. Use the settings menu to configure the mission settings.

Search Mission Configuration

Brief description of the available settings:

Altitude: Constant flight altitude for the generated flight plan.

Gimbal Tilt: The angle, in degrees, of the gimbal while flying the mission. This can be set from -90' (looking straight down) to 0' (looking straight up).

Camera Point: The GPS point towards which the drone orients itself during the mission. If you would like to look at a constant GPS point throughout the mission, set it here by tapping the camera point box.

Reversed Flight Path: Switch to configure the start and end of the flight path. When on, the generated flight path will be followed from the outside to the inside. This is useful if you would like to start the search on the edge of the shape and gradually move inwards.

Steps to Simulate

1. Once you are finished creating and configuring the mission, simply press play button in the right panel.
2. 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.
3. The simulation will begin and you’ll see a simulated drone appear on the screen flying the search mission.

Search Mission with Camera Point

Steps to Fly

1. Once you are happy with the created mission, simply connect your drone to Hammer through the USB port on the remote controller.
2. You’ll see a drone icon appear on the screen at it’s current location.
3. Press Play to start the mission.
4. Press Pause anytime to pause the mission, and play to resume the mission.

Object Detection

We are actively working on integrating people/object detecting during the search mission. If you would like a specific object to be detected, please get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to look into your particular use-case.

Summary

And…that’s it! Now you know how to create, simulate and fly your own search mission in Hammer. If you currently do not have access to the iOS app, feel free to contact us at team@hammermissions.com or download the app from the app store.

If you’d like to learn more about other missions supported in Hammer, please visit https://medium.com/@hammermissions