I plan on the following for my test.
The drone should be here on Wednesday and hopefully within a week I can find time to do a test.
Drones in test.
Matrice 4E
Matrice 4T
Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced
Mavic 3E
Phantom 4 RTK
All drones will receive corrections from my RTK subscription service located 19 km away.
All drones will import a kml that will then be used to plan a single grid flight plan with Altitude Optimization turned on (Oblique images from the outside to the center of the map).
Overlap will be 80/80
GSD will be set at 1cm so the altitudes will differ due to the different camera specs/focal lengths.
All drones will fly at a maximum of 15 mph.
No GCPs will be used.
5 Check Points will be laid out evenly and measured with an Emlid RS2+ receiving corrections from my RTK service. Each point will be collected for 2 minutes.
I will process in Agisoft Metashape Pro. I can also process in Drone Deploy, Pix4Dmapper, Pix4Dmatic and MipMap.
Datums and Coordinate Systems: Drone: NAD83(2011) with ellipsoid elevations. GNSS Rover: NAD83(2011) with ellipsoid elevations. Agisoft outputs: NAD83(2011) NJ State Plane US Survey ft, orthometric elevations in NAVD88 US Survey ft using Geoid 18.
I can process the data for the drones lacking a mechanical shutter two times. One time without Rolling Shutter Compensation and the second time with Rolling Shutter Compensation if needed.
I may have one wildcard GCP in the center of the map to test if using just that one GCP increases accuracy/precision, especially in the vertical.
When the tests are completed, I will post the Quality Report showing the RMSE for the Check Points.
If I had to predict a winner I would bet on the Mavic 3E. But the Phantom 4 RTK has always been a rock solid mapping drone. It just has longer intervals between images slowing it down and its images are not as good as the Matrice 4E and Mavic 3E. In my testing of mapping similar areas between the M3E, P4RTK and M4E, the Matrice 4E has yet to consistently beat the Phantom 4 RTK or Mavic 3E, most likely due to me always maxing out the speed on the Matrice 4E since it can take and write images so fast and it still not being fully dialed in by DJI.
My predictions:
1. M3E
2. P4RTK
3. M4E
4. M4T
5. M2EA (RMSE measured in meters in the horizontal)
I do have access to an M300RTK at work, we do not have the P1 camera though. I wish I could add this full frame camera to the mix.
Please feel free to critique this test.
