Drone Mission Simulator

Simulate drone flights and take images of your 3D objects.

Description

This simulator was built on Unity. It was developed to fly over a terrain and take images of it, like a drone would. The project is based on this other flight planner.

The project has two possible outputs:

1. The mission simulation, which outputs geotagged images and a XML with the simulation description.
2. You can also generate other 2D maps of your terrain, such as an elevation or segmentation map. It might be useful if you want to have a ground truth.

Instalation

The project doesn't have a binary or something like that yet. We only provide the Unity project so you can run it by yourself. To run the simulator, you will have to:

1. Download Unity Hub
2. Download a version of the Unity Editor (the project was built with the version 2019.1.5)
3. Clone or download this repo
4. Go to the folder Assets > Scenes, choose any of the folders and open the scene file (file with.unity extension).

Important

The project has only been tested on Windows. In fact, for Geotagging, we use exiftool and the project currently has a Windows pre-built binary for doing so. So it might require some extra work (but not too much) to run it in other platforms. If you happen to make it work, please create a Pull Request so we can merge it.

Running

When openning the proyect, you might see some errors: That's ok, it's because some files were not added to the repo in order to reduce the size. Those files will be auto-generated, so don't worry.

Simulation

To run the simulation, simply press the Play button. The simulation will start, and the georeferenced images will be generated in a folder named Images inside the repo (this can be modified of course). Once the simulation is over, and the images are generated and tagged, the simulation will stop by itself. It might look like the simulation 'has lag'. This can happen if the flight speed and the images' resolution are too high, but the images will be captured correctly, so don't worry.

Flight Parameters

To modify the mission's parameters, you must first select the camera on the Hierarchy menu, and then you will be able to adjust your flight plan on the Inspector on the right.

Light Baking

It might happen that at some point, the scene becomes a little darker. This is because Unity regenerated the high quality lights in the scene when it detects a change. You can know if this process is happening by checking at the bottom right corner. If this process is ongoing, you can just wait a few seconds for the process to regenarate the lights.

2D Maps

To generate the 2D Maps, you can go to Window > Terrain Tools.

You will be able to determine the size and the quality of the map.

Terrain

If you want to modify the terrain that already comes with the project, you can easily add/remove elevation, trees, grass, water, etc. Check the documentation on how to do so. The proyect already has some trees downloaded from the Unity Asset Store. You can download more if you like. To check the pre-downloaded models, navigate to Assets > Models.

What's coming in the future?

There are a few improvement to be made, starting with:

1. Making the simulator cross platform.
2. Building the project so that it is not necessary to install Unity.
3. Fix problem with numeric formats where commas and dots are switched.

Contributing

If you happen to tackle any of the issue above, or any others, please send a PR our way and we will be more than happy to merge them!