Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (commonly referred to as “drones”) are becoming an important tool in wildlife conservation and habitat monitoring. They enable low cost surveillance of remote areas that are difficult to reach, at a scale that would otherwise be impossible with the typically meager resources of most conservation organizations. Unfortunately, their potential is currently limited by the fact that long range operations have to rely on autonomous flight when the drone extends beyond radio control range. The current process of manually specifying the route for autonomous flight is error prone especially in remote areas, because of challenging terrain variations, restricted airspaces and weather conditions along the route. I have attempted to develop a solution to this problem, using the A-Star Algorithm and the Google Elevation API.
Here is a presentation of the overall idea: https://github.com/mihirbala/dronemap/blob/master/DronePresentation.pdf