Linear Inspections 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 linear inspections — 1 of the 3 inspection missions supported by Hammer:

1. Horizontal Inspection — of buildings, roofs, and other infrastructure.
2. Linear Inspection — of pipelines, railroads, rivers and other linear objects.
3. Vertical Inspection — of building walls, cliffs and other vertical structures.

Linear Inspection

This type of inspection is useful for surveying gas pipelines / railroads and other resources that appear linear in geometry from a height, rivers for instance.

In this mission, Hammer calculates picture points on top of a user-defined line and flies the drone to these points maintaining a constant altitude throughout the mission. The drone stops at every point in the mission, adjusts its heading to match the line’s heading and takes a high resolution picture of the linear structure.

Steps to Create

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

Note: A line 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 line, click OK on the right panel.

This will generate a dotted string of points on top of the line.

Creating a Linear Inspection Mission

Steps to Configure

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

Configuring a Linear Inspection Mission

Brief description of the available settings:

Altitude: Flight altitude for all generated points (blue dots) in the mission.

Image Overlap: The % of overlap between any images on the line.

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 linear inspection mission.

Playing a Linear Inspection Mission

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.

Summary

And…that’s it! Now you know how to create, simulate and fly your own linear inspection 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