Use automatic mission creation to generate missions for imported flight logs if no existing missions match the flight log times. Alternatively manually create missions from flight logs.
Retrospective missions are useful for users who don't have time to create a mission due to an urgent operation, or when planning in the field isn't available to the user. This article will cover the two ways to create retrospective missions:
Manually creating missions from flight logs
Configuring Automatic mission creation
Manually creating missions from flight logs
This method is useful for users who were intending to plan the mission out in the field but unable to.
To start, upload your flight logs to the Office App.
Under the incoming tab of the flight logs, click 'Assign to a mission' under Mission Name column.
Select 'Create Retrospective Mission', complete all fields and click 'Create Retrospective Mission'.
This will create a mission. Follow the same procedure you would to finalise the mission. See How to finalise your missions if you are unsure of the process.
Configuring Automatic mission creation
If you utilise flight log cloud syncing, you have the capability to establish automated mission creation and customise it to automatically group flight logs with similar time and location that do not correspond to any existing missions. Subsequently, a mission will be generated for those logs. The newly created mission will include a flight for each log and can optionally be configured to assign a default pilot, utilise a specific workflow, and consistently be assigned a specific mission type.
The automatic mission creation will only run on flight logs collected since the automatic mission creation was setup. You can run the process across the existing flight logs from the flight log collection source by clicking the Create missions now button.
Setting up and editing automatic mission creation
If you have access to automatic mission creation the configuration settings can be accessed from your flight log list. From the flight log list, click on Setup Cloud Flight Log Sync.
The settings screen that opens is where you can set up automatic flight log syncing via various flight log cloud services. If you haven't set up cloud syncing for your flight logs yet, you will need to do so first. Follow our guide on this here: Flight Log Syncing via DJI Cloud
In your cloud sync settings will be a column labelled Automatic Mission Creation. Click the cog button in this column to open the automatic mission creation settings.
Firstly you can enable or disable automatic mission creation.
Then the two required parameters are used to configure which flight logs will be determined to be part of the same mission when a mission is created.
- Maximum distance will limit which flight logs are grouped based off how far from each other they can be. Logs outside this distance threshold will be considered to be part of a separate mission.
- Maximum time difference will determine how much time can pass between the end of one flight and the start of the next for them to still be part of the same mission.
If the 'Log requires an RPA' tick box is selected, the RPA must exist in the system. This will create missions with that RPA.
If 'Log requires an RPA' tick box is not selected, missions will be created without an RPA associated.
For example: Company A has automatic mission creation settings with these two settings set to a maximum distance of 2000 m and a maximum time difference of 3 hours. They complete 4 flights over two days.
- Flight 1 and 2 are completed at the same location and within an hour of each other
- Flight 3 is completed two hours later than flight two, but at a location 10km away
- Flight 4 is completed at the same location as flights 1 and 2, but is only flown the next day
In this scenario three missions will be generated:
- Mission 1 will include both flights 1 and 2 since they were within the distance and time thresholds
- Mission 2 will include flight 3 because, while it did fall within the time threshold, it was outside the distance threshold of flights 1,2 and 4
- Mission 3 will include flight 4 because, while it did fall within the distance threshold of flights 1 and 2, the time between flight 2 and flight 4 was greater than the time threshold.
The second group of settings are optional, and can be used to set which pilot, mission type and mission workflow to use when creating missions automatically. The chosen pilot will be assigned to every flight.
If you leave any of these settings blank a default mission type and workflow will be used based on your organisation jurisdiction and you will need to assign the pilots manually by editing the generated missions.
Once you click save the configuration will go into effect if it has been enabled. Missions will be generated within 24 hours after the flight log is synced. If you need to generate a mission immediately there will be a Generate missions now button in the Automatic Mission Creation column of the flight log cloud settings.
Generated missions will be in the mission list on the dashboard and can be edited like any completed mission.