Technical details

Swinglet CAM

The mini-plane

The mini-plane has a flight endurance of about 30 minutes with a fully-charged battery. The endurance is reduced with wind, frequent altitude changes or very low temperatures. The cruise speed is 10 m/s (36 km/h, 22 mph). The climb rate is about 3 m/s. The maximum wind speed is 7 m/s (25 km/h, 16 mph), which corresponds to a moderate breeze. This includes a safety margin to allow the mini-plane to fly back home automatically when strong wind is detected by the autopilot.

Advanced image processing

Automated Orthomosaic & Digital Elevation Model (DEM):

  • The software searches for matching points by analysing all uploaded images.
  • Those matching points and approximate values of the image position and orientation are used in a bundle block adjustment to reconstruct the exact position and orientation of the camera for every acquired image.
  • Based on this reconstruction the matching points are verified and their 3D coordinates calculated. The geo-reference system is WGS84, based on GPS measurements from the autopilot during the flight.
  • Those 3D points are interpolated to form a triangulated irregular network in order to obtain the DEM.
  • This DEM is used to project every image pixel and calculate the georeferenced orthomosaic (also called "true orthophoto").

The accuracy of the orthomosaics and the digital elevation models strongly depends on the flight height, lighting conditions, availability of textures, image quality, overlap, and type of terrain. In standard conditions (flying at 100-150 metres above natural terrains with 50 to 70% image overlap), a relative accuracy of 10cm and an absolute accuracy of 3 metres can be expected at the location of the found matching points, although between these points the accuracy may vary significantly. One way to improve accuracy is to add in ‘ground control points’ – this is a manual process and is included as an option in our quotations. More information on accuracy can be found here.  Please note that we cannot guarantee the quality and accuracy of the output files.

Contact us

For further information please visit the contact us page.