How to create your own flight routes

⚠️ Note: Volateq has an integrated flight planner that designs flight routes automatically (see How to create a new analysis and flight campaign) for a large number of drone models that are listed here. We strongly recommend you use our flight planning and drone controller app ("Volafly") for these drones.

If you have a different drone model that is not yet integrated, you can follow the below instructions to program your own flight routes.

Thermography standard:

• create an area route in Flighthub 2

  • enable both visual and IR data acquisition

  • set IR camera GSD to 6cm/px (3cm/px for IEC inspections)

    • make sure that also the RGB camera GSD stays below 4 cm/px

  • under advanced settings set side overlap to 70% and speed to 6m/s or front overlap to >=86%

  • the drone should fly straight over the modules, and perpendicular to the module rows, not diagonal (in Flighthub 2 manually set the "Course angle")

• draw the flight area polygon around your target area (solar field)

  • include sufficient margin around the actual solar field, we recommend drawing the polygon ~10m away from the last module. There should be at least one entire meander line beyond the edges of the area you want to inspect.

  • a single evaluation can cover up to 100 ha

• IR camera: color scheme/palette → WhiteHot or IronBow, gain mode → low

• RGB wide angle camera: focus mode → AFC, image resolution 4K

• more camera settings are documented in the drone-specific configuration pages

Thermography according to IEC:

• same as above, but with an IR GSD of 3cm

• IEC 62446-3 inspections additionally require ambient condition sensor data (POA irradiance, wind speed, ambient temperature, cloud coverage) to be recorded during the flight. See the Data acquisition checklist PV thermography – IEC section for full details.

Soiling:

• please contact us for camera settings and how to program the flight route around the manually cleaned reference module! You can follow the steps above first and we add an additional flight section together.

• GSD of the RGB camera of <1.4cm, with side overlap >=70% and front >=86%.

• If IR data for thermography has to be acquired in the same flight, make sure that GSD requirements and overlaps are larger than 70% and 86% for both cameras (usually IR will be the limiting factor!).

Dock:

• if you are using a DJI Dock, follow the same steps above like for any other drone

  • camera settings like IR color palette, RGB resolution and focus can be set in the virtual cockpit if the drone is turned on

• you are responsible to create a Task plan and make sure the drone flies at good ambient conditions just like with a handheld drone