pythonmatharearcredgreen

How do you calculate the area of a series of random points?

So I'm working on a piece of code to take positional data for a RC Plane Crop Duster and compute the total surface area transversed (without double counting any area). I cannot figure out how to calculate the area for a given period of operation.

Given the following Table Calculate the area the points cover.

x,y
1,2
1,5
4,3
6,6
3,4
3,1

Any Ideas? I've browsed Greens Theorem and I'm left without a practical concept in which to code.

Thanks for any advise

Solution

    1. Build the convex hull from the given points

      Algorithms are described here

      See a very nice python demo + src

    2. Calculate its area

      Python code is here