How can I find 3d distance between lat/lon/alt points?

0
votes

There is plenty of information on finding the distances between two WGS 84 lat/lon points but not much on the distance between two WGS 84 /lat/lon/alt points, are there any libraries that can do this? can anyone point me to information about this? I am using it for a UAV collision avoidance system so it needs to be accurate for distances 0-20m away further than that I don'y really care.

1
pythonpython-2.7gis

1 Answers

2
votes

think of it like a triangle enter image description here

now just use simple geometry to find the length of the hypotenous

a**2+b**2 = c**2
latlon_dist**2+height_dist**2 = distance**2
distance = sqrt(latlon_dist**2+height_dist**2)