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"Relative Altitude" setting on the Area Route configuration bar?

SandCop

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I am new to Autel and the Evo II. I've been flying DJI P4A for several years in and around forest fires (as part of the firefighting operation). I Finally got tired of fighting with geo fencing and bought an Evo II Pro. I just updated the Explorer App to 1.18.13. I now see on the Area Route Configuration bar a choice for a grid mission which I will use on mapping missions. Also new is a "relative altitude" setting (or I just never noticed it before). I can not find anything on line at Autel's web site or any of the forums. Could someone please point me to an explanation of this feature. Is this Autel's take on terrain awareness a la MapPilot?

Thanks

Gary
 
My understanding is that it's the relative altitude to Home, not to the ground during flight.
 
I fail to see how that is any different than the altitude I've set for the mission; unless the altitude setting for the mission is terrain following, which I doubt. This needs clarification from Autel! I'm not about to use a setting when I have no idea what it's supposed to do.

Thanks,

Gary
 
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Agreed, they need to document more. It was a setting that showed up in a prior update with no info about. Even the pop-up isn't well written. Clicking the ? to the side of shows a pop-up stating:

"Set the altitude of the shooting environment relative to the takeoff point.Take off in a safe area"

I wouldn't test except for in an open field but it seems that the Altitude is the takeoff altitude. Relative Altitude is used for the actual mission path. So my guess is that a mission would:

Take off to Altitude
Fly to mission Start
Set altitude to Relative Altitude
Fly mission to End
Set altitude to Altitude
Fly Home

I can't test because of weather and snow everywhere but that's my guess anyway.
 
I wonder if contacting Autel directly would stimulate some clarification?

Gary
 
It's worth a shot. It's a setting that's been there for awhile so hopefully they would have an answer for it. I didn't get an answer the last time I asked about a mission setting. I got a reply but there wasn't much of an answer in it.
 
May not hurt to ask them what the field "enableTopographyFollow":false in a mission's .TXT file means and if it's related to the Relative Altitude and, if not, how does one enable it for a mission.
 
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Got an answer from Autel customer support...

"The relative AGL was ment to be a go between when you have a different area for operation and an alternate landing location. This is a beta feature and seems to have been left into the released version. At this time it is not useful since you can not change the land location apart from the controller or the home point. Unfortunately it's not terrain following.

Best,

Brady R. | Commercial Support Agent
www.autelrobotics.com"

I'm still not exactly sure what that means, but for right now I guess it mean it doesn't do anything useful.

Gary
 
Thanks for posting their response. So it's a beta feature that doesn't exist yet. I guess that explains the very poor text formatting.

The option to store whether or not a mission was enabled for topology following does exist in the mission database. I've done some digging the past couple days. So it's a feature that's not in Explorer yet or will only be available for maybe RTK drones or will get enabled for all down the road or not at all. Who knows.
 

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Reviving this old thread. When planning a rectangular mission, I ran into the relative altitude input setting. I was planning a mission in mountainous forest. I assume the altitude setting is the desired altitude over the obstacles and the relative altitude is the guesstimate of the height of the obstacles? In my scenario the trees plus any rise in terrain in my planned mission area is no more than 100ft and I desire the drone to fly its mission 100ft above the trees. From what I can tell I input 100ft for "altitude" and 100ft for "relative altitude". Can anyone confirm that is correct? Thx
 
Got an answer from Autel customer support...

"The relative AGL was ment to be a go between when you have a different area for operation and an alternate landing location. This is a beta feature and seems to have been left into the released version. At this time it is not useful since you can not change the land location apart from the controller or the home point. Unfortunately it's not terrain following.

Best,

Brady R. | Commercial Support Agent
www.autelrobotics.com"

I'm still not exactly sure what that means, but for right now I guess it mean it doesn't do anything useful.

Gary
This from the DJI site:
"When the elevation of the takeoff location is different from the elevation of the area being mapped, you can adjust the Relative Height to ensure sufficient overlap rates in the measurement. Please see the attached illustration here: Phantom 4 RTK - Product Information - DJI - #19
If the drone takes off from a 50m building marked H1 in the illustration, the area being mapped is marked A, and the expected altitude for aerial data collection is 100m, you can set the Mission Altitude in to 100m, and Relative Height to 50m. Similarly, if the drone takes off from H2 to map Area B, which is a hill with an elevation of 40m, and the expected altitude for aerial data collection is 60m, then set Mission Altitude to be 60m, and Relative Height to be -40m. You can adjust Relative Height in Photogrammetry 2D, Photogrammetry 3D (Double Grid), Photogrammetry 3D (Multi-oriented), Linear Flight Mission, and Block Segmentation missions."

Hopefully, Autel is trying to mimic DJI with this. This is active in the current verion of Explorer v3.1.26. This explanation makes more sense than a alternate landing location theory and I experiece it working this way. The Explorer documentation is lacking in any depth and is not current with the software releases. Can't believe this is still an indocumented feature for this long!

Hope this helps..
 
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