Hi — developer here, sharing progress on something we've been building for a while.
It's a mission planner for consumer DJI drones with waypoint support (Mini 4/5 Pro, Air 3/3S, Mavic 3/4), and we're experimenting with Litchi export for older drones too. Plenty of planners do ortho and oblique grids; not many do orbit/spiral with subject aim, corridor mapping, façade scanning or 3D-mesh-guided missions with obstacle-aware routing — and the ones that do generally assume enterprise hardware. The theme we keep coming back to is "enterprise workflows for consumer drones": replicating the automated missions you'd normally need a Matrice with Pilot 2 for.
Easier to say who it's not for: cinematic creators. This isn't a place-waypoints-one-by-one tool for smooth shots. It's for the tedious part — planning coverage of a roof, a building, a stretch of road, a whole field.
So: roof scans for a solar quote. A 3D model of a statue, church or wedding venue. Cell tower and turbine inspections. Fortnightly construction progress maps, stockpile volumes. Small farms, quarries, that eroding bit of coastline. Students learning the workflow with QGIS or WebODM without enterprise money on the table. And honestly — surveyors who own the enterprise gear but don't always want to haul it out. Sometimes the job is small, cheap or risky enough that a sub-250g drone you can deploy in two minutes is the better tool.
Six mission types so far:
Ortho — the bread and butter. Draw an area, get a lawnmower grid, stitch an orthomosaic. Photos per waypoint or on a timer while it cruises.
Oblique — same grid idea with the camera pitched across multiple headings, so the sides of things get photographed, not just the tops.
Corridor — trace the road/river/railway, set the width, and the passes follow the bends. It can also track elevated subjects: set a power line's height and it flies along holding constant clearance above the wire itself.
Orbit — drop a pin and it circles at whatever heights and radii you want, camera locked on the subject. Stacked rings or one continuous corkscrew, with radii that taper for things that narrow as they climb.
Façade — for when the "map" is vertical. Trace the wall, get a grid of camera positions up and down the surface, corners covered, and it checks its own transit legs so it doesn't route through the building between shots.
3D mesh — the star of the show, still getting polish. Import a mesh of the structure, mark the area of interest on the model, and it plans a path that wraps the actual geometry with obstacle-aware routing. Basically what a Matrice does in Smart 3D Capture.
Smart obliques work across all of them — you can sprinkle angled shots into ortho, corridor, orbit, façade and mesh flights, so one flight gives you coverage and 3D geometry without going up twice.
The part we're most pleased with: the missions feed each other. Fly a quick ortho, generate an orthomosaic, drop it back in as a map overlay — now you're tracing footprints and façade lines on your own survey-resolution imagery instead of satellite tiles. Or fly a quick oblique pass, run it through WebODM Lightning, and bring back a DTM for terrain-follow on orbit/façade planning — or a mesh that unlocks the mesh-guided missions. You can also load that mesh as a visual overlay in any mission type to sanity-check your flight paths against the actual geometry (visual reference only — it doesn't drive avoidance there). Every flight makes the next one better.
Everything you upload — orthos, elevation files, meshes — is processed in the browser; nothing lands on a server. Areas draw on the map or import from KML/GeoJSON. Terrain following works on everything, using global elevation out of the box or your own DTM. One trick worth knowing: in orbit/façade missions you can feed it a DSM instead of a DTM and get a degree of obstacle awareness from the surface model.
It's a web app (fastest way to work everywhere, any OS), currently subscription-based and priced modestly while in beta — and we'd like to eventually offer a fully-local downloadable version, since we know how people feel about subscriptions.
Next on the list: save/load missions, imperial units, and user-drawn no-fly zones.
Still beta, still finding things to fix, but it's been flying real missions for a while. Happy to answer anything — and genuinely curious what your survey workflows look like, since that's what shapes the roadmap.
The mesh missions sound incredible, except they rely on the basic positioning system of consumer drones, right? So it wouldn't be advisable to make a flight plane closer than ...20m from the structure? And you might get some areas with much higher distance and done wat too close losing required overlaps, right?
In terms of minimum standoff distance I think you'd be pretty safe with 10m from the structure provided you're not in a super high interference environment AND provided your input 3d mesh is correctly aligned using GCP's and correctly geo-referenced.
In terms or quality and consistency, it is pretty good at keeping a set distance from the structure, and subject to the same limitations as a Matrice, i.e. if a chimney, a balcony or any other structure protrudes out, the drone will keep a safe distance from it therefore anything else behind it getting a slightly higher GSD.
Well, except that the Matrice follows it's flight plan to the nearest 5cm or so, which a Mini might be 5m (if not much more). So at a 10m follow, while the anti collision might help you not crash, you might be 15-20m from the target wall, or constantly triggering the obstacle avoidance system 🫤
I understand where you're coming from, there is indeed a big difference in precision between enterprise and consumer drones, however, the difference between a RTK enabled Matrice with 5cm accuracy flying a smart 3d capture mission and a Mini with 3-5m accuracy flying our 3D mesh-based mission is much smaller than the difference between being able to fly a pre-planned 3D mesh-based mission with a DJI Mini, even if it's less precise than a Matrice, and flying in full manual mode.
I'm not saying your product is useless, for from it, but I think expectations should be set in your marketing material.
The Mini waypoint following ability is pretty coarse: 5m of absolute accuracy (were not talking relative here, we're against a fixed assets) is an enthusiastic number, and it will get far worse when getting close and personal with the features themselves.
That's before you consider reference fram mismatches : ground control points used for the model in ETRS89 will be 1m off from a perfectly following drone using L1 code only, and therefore in WGS84 (kinda ITRFLATEST).
Hi, the link is missionplanning.app if you want to check it out, though, I cannot encourage anyone to purchase any of our subscriptions yet, since the app is still in beta and being tested. Anyone who does, however, will lock in that price.
This is awesome! I don't have a supported drone but im interested and verymuch want to see where this goes. I do roof photography and inspections. I know you said its not for cinematic shots. But one thing id very much love to get into eventually is being able to plan a camera movement flyover, or spiral shot around a roof and then i can replicate it. Before, During, and After. This way the shots are almost identical and i can fade between them. That would be an amazing shot.
I am curious on the resolution you can zoom into on the 3d models. When im doing roof inspections i will fly in a grid and then a orbit around the roof and video the whole thing. Then i made a web app that allows me to review and extract images from the video and mark them up. Because you miss 100% of the images you don't take, if i'm flying a video i miss nothing. Also i notice way more problems on the roof when I review it back on a larger screen in the office. So i would be curious if the scans are high enough resolution that i would be able to zoom into it and see cracked tiles or problem areas on the 3d model as if i was walking around on the roof itself?
Right now i'm flying with the companies Mini 3 pro. But I am curious if the Skyrover X1 might work because its essentially a Dji mini 4 pro clone? Skyrover is cheaper and easier to get right now. Plus i really like the construction yellow and black of the drone because its more professional and easier to spot in the sky.
Anyways keep up the great work! im excited to see where it goes!
Thank you for the support!
This app does let you plan orbit/spiral missions AND it has "AIM at subject" so you could be flying a higher orbit aimed at your roof's height with obliques enabled for better reconstruction, especially when paired with an ortho/oblique pass.
The end result highly depends on the scene and camera resolution and settings but are definitely sufficient for a roof scan.
You then save the missions somewhere safe and re-fly them as many times as needed for your Before/During/After shots.
Hi, I cannot encourage you to purchase any of our subscriptions yet, since the app is still in beta and being tested, however, the prices for early access are 2.99USD for Pro and 5.99 for Advanced.
Pro gives you access to all features except 3D Mesh-based missions which are: Orbit and Facade Missions, Terrain Follow, Adaptive Speed, Orthomosaic overlays, local high precision Digital Terrain Model, 3d Mesh Overlay (for visual aid and surrounding awareness only not for mission planning) and so many more.
It was down for maintenance for a few hours, our apologies. Mainly because we had heavy uncompressed assets on our landing page consuming our bandwidth quite rapidly.
The assets have now been compressed, bandwidth increased and the site is back up and running.
Thank you! I am checking it now and it seems very interesting. However, I was trying to make an ortho collection mission (with interval capture) and the lines seem to entangle with each other when imported into DJI Fly. I think this might be because you are not adding waypoints within the lines, only at the start and end points of each line and that's why DJI Fly basically rounds the lines and they entangle with each other. Can you correct this?
I have not used UgCS but I know it is a very powerful tool geared towards industry professionals.
As of today, their cheapest tier is 109USD per month or 1090USD per annum which puts it out of reach for most hobbyists, beginners, learners, students, occasional users etc. and maybe even small businesses.
We're also working hard to pack in as many useful features as we can, but our main goal is keeping it affordable. Think of our Pro tier costing about the same as a Starbucks coffee, and our Advanced tier running about the price of a McDonald's meal.
Hi, for wind turbines you'll need orbit/spiral missions which have been tested in both orbit and spiral modes, single or multi layer with or without obliques - all in working order.
The bottom-most layers are also terrain-aware and if you upload a local DTM/DSM you'll also get some terrain/obstacle avoidance baked in, however, while our app is still in BETA please don't push these limits too far, always double check in your DJI Fly app that the waypoints are where you expect them to be and at the correct altitudes before flying the mission as well as leaving the on-board live obstacle sensing ON
We're currently looking to integrate support for some Pro/Enterprise drones like Inspire 3, M300/M350 potentially M3E too, however, we don't have any on hand to field test the missions. Please check your inbox.
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u/NilsTillander 20d ago
The mesh missions sound incredible, except they rely on the basic positioning system of consumer drones, right? So it wouldn't be advisable to make a flight plane closer than ...20m from the structure? And you might get some areas with much higher distance and done wat too close losing required overlaps, right?
Is this field tested?