The R-based UAV-tools consist of two packages:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Remote Sensing Toolbox - uavRst

The uavRstanalysis toolbox package is far from being mature. You will need for most of the uavRst functions a bunch of third party software. The most comfortable way to fulfill these requirements is to install QGIS, GRASS- and SAGA-GIS. Following the excellent provided by the RQGIS team will give you a good first try to ensure a smooth working environment.

Most of the LiDAR related operations can be done by the great R package lidR. However for some of the basic point cloud related operations you will need to install the LAStool software. The LAStools toolset is available at the rapidlasso homepage. Please download it and unzip it as usual. For Windows systems it is by default expected that you put it at C:/LASTools, running Linux at ~/apps/LASTools.

Note: For running LAStools tools under Linux you first need to install wine.

In addition you need to install the link2GI package. In case of any problems drop an issue or try to use the actual github hosted version of the package.

Nevertheless all mentioned software packages have to be installed correctly on your the OS. Most of it tested under Windows and Linux and should run… The most easiest way to obtain a fairly good runtime enviroment is to setup Linux as a dual boot system or in a VB.

A full list of necessary libaries and binaries beyond R will hopefully (soon) be provided.

Wiki

You will find some tutorials and examples at the uavRst Wiki. Please feel free to participate.

Installation

Note: Currently (10/2022) the velox, spatial.tools and gdalUtils packages are archived on CRAN and only available as an archived/Github version. Up to now the functionality in the uavRST package is not substituted. So you have to install these packages from source:

devtools::install_url('http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/spatial.tools/spatial.tools_1.6.2.tar.gz')

devtools::install_github("hunzikp/velox")

devtools::install_url('http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/gdalUtils/gdalUtils_2.0.3.tar.gz')

To install the actual development version from github you need to have installed the devtools package.

devtools::install_github("gisma/uavRst", ref = "master")