Drone Settings

This is the total number of possible scans or moves that a drone can do.

Often the auto-stop process will trigger first, but if not this is the fall back of the total allowed scans any drone can take. This is to stop them running forever and to ensure the amount of data stays reasonable.

Increase in very large cases or where you want to be super thorough. Also take into account the auto-stop process as that is likely to stop the drone first unless increased too.

These are the number of scans with no new data before they automatically stop, e.g. 500 means the drone has scanned/moved 500 times without detecting anything new so will stop.

Building drones scan areas to find new collision points that they haven't found before (within a distance set by Min Point Distance). If they haven't detected a new point in the Auto-Stop Building amount, they will automatically finish.

Testing drones scan for any points that aren't covered by a volume. If they haven't found a warning or error location in the Auto-Stop Testing amount, they will automatically finish.

Both values are used to ensure the drone can stop early if it's essentially finished scanning the area and nothing new has been detected for a while. Without this, they would continue for the Max Drone Scan amount, which would be unnecessary in a small area.

The reason Building and Testing have different values is because Testing is looking for warnings or errors and there's likely to be considerably fewer of them, there may only be one small area in a volume that is a problem, so the drone needs a higher number of attempts to discover it. Building drones by contrast will be discovering new points all the time until the area is mapped, so the auto-stop can be set lower. With this in mind, increase the Auto-Stop Testing amount if you want to be more thorough with tests. 

Drones can naturally run considerably faster than humans can, so we increase the Scanning Rate  (as set in Detection Settings) by this amount to allow them to carry out the job considearbly faster.

If you have a powerful machine, consider increasing this so that detections happen faster, although check for problems caused by pushing the system too far, e.g. extraneous points being generated. It's usually best to leave your system a little headroom to avoid bad data.

Lowering this down can help identify the cause of drones misbehaving, e.g. how they are escaping through holes in the geometry or getting stuck.

Ensure drones can't fit through gaps by increasing the size of the drone. This effectively makes them slightly 'fat', so they can't wiggle through small spaces where they shouldn't. 

If you increase this too much you increase the chance of the drone not being able to reach all areas, so there's definitely a balance to be found

By default drones do have some width for saftey, to ensure they stay within common sense expectations.

The drone can move up and down in height each time it moves. This setting specifies how high and low it is allowed to go. 

The amount is always relative to the start location. This means that it can't continually accumulate height and, say, fly out of a skylight, although this is still possible if the setting is set too high.

When it attempts to move in height, it checks to see if it would hit anything so as long as the ceiling/floor has collision then it should be constrained by the room.

The amount is plus and minus the start height, so a setting of 150 would allow a total range of height movement of 300, with the centre point being the start location.

As a result of this it's good to keep this in mind when starting drones and also placing depots too.

The reason this is important is if you have objects close to the edges of walls, etc they could otherwise make the room appear smaller to the detection than it really is. So it's  usually a good idea to have some amount of height variability. See below for example.

Also, keep height variability in mind when dealing with areas of bumpy, uneven terrain or inclinations/declinations on the ground. Without enough height variability the drone can get stuck in a crater or at the bottom of a hill. 

Each scan, the drone will move forward until it hits something. This value is how far it will move forward in Unreal units.

Increasing this value can allow the drone to cover larger areas with less scans, however it'll obviously fly past areas while it's doing that. Naturally the drone will turn around when it hits something, so the hope is that it will eventually come back to the areas that it flew past earlier. 

Usually you don't need to adjust this too much, but it has a direct relation to the Auto-Stop system. This is because a low Drone Distance is more likely to result in not detecting new areas, so the auto-stop will be reached sooner. 

It's also useful to increase this when covering large empty areas, such as exteriors. This is because without geometry to detect in open areas, the auto-stop will fill up quickly and stop the drone before it's really detected the area fully. By increasing the Drone Distance, we can increase it's chances of finding the extremities of the space better.