What is required for thermal mapping in Site Scan Flight for ArcGIS?

Answer

Thermal inspections and thermal mapping in Site Scan Flight for ArcGIS require specific drones and hardware to get successful results.

The supported hardware for thermal mapping is:

• DJI M200 V1 series drones with the DJI Zenmuse XT or XT2 cameras
• DJI M200 V2 series drones with the DJI Zenmuse XT2 camera

For the XT camera, it must be connected to Port 1 for M210 and M210 RTK drones. 

For thermal mapping, an overlap and sidelap of 80% is required; the software automatically detects the thermal camera connected to the drone and should update these values to 80%. Do not go below this default value. This overlap is based on a 16mm lens, if using a longer focal length lens, a larger overlap is needed. Due to this high overlap, Area Survey is the recommended mission type for these flights.

The wireless transfer procedure is not available for thermal cameras, so the images must be taken from the SD card on the drone and uploaded directly into Site Scan Manager. The process for this image upload and the processing of this imagery follows the same workflows as any other flight.