Hivemapper Helps Drones Avoid Obstacles While Flying

Buildings come in different shapes and sizes and heights. This is why when flying drones around buildings, this is something that needs to be taken into consideration, and is much different compared to flying a drone in a park where all you have are trees and open skies to deal with.

This is why the Hivemapper app might be of interest to drone hobbyists. Basically the app could be thought of as the Waze for drones. It shows the drone pilot obstacles that they might fly into. For example if a building is higher than expected, it will warn the pilot about it so they can fly higher. They also warn pilots about buildings next to the drone if they are too close and might bump into it.

The app will also show drone pilots places where they are not allowed to fly if they don’t want to get into any trouble, such as airports, government buildings, and the likes. However just like Waze, Hivemapper is crowdsourced meaning that other users will need to help by entering in data like locations and building dimensions.

As it stands, there are over 20 million building boundaries at launch, along with over 16,000 no-fly zones that have been listed, but as time passes we expect that there will be more data added to it. As it stands the app is currently in beta and will be compatible with a few drones, like the DJI Phantom 3, Phantom 2, and Inspire 1. If you own any of those drones and want to take the app for a spin, head over to Google Play for the download. iOS users will need to sign up for the beta.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones, Robots, Videos (web)
Tags: Apps, Drones