Sep 22, 2020 

Week 4 Field Report Jesse Giampaolo, Cole Bramel, Nick Dayton

AT 409 UAS Capstone Course 9/15/2020

 

Martell Forest mission:

 

The flights today were once again completed over Martell Forest. I was PIC for the first flight of the day and this was my group’s first chance to conduct a full mission with the M600. We used the PPK as opposed to the GCPs used last week. These work with Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) to provide more accurate GPS data than the GCPs could provide. These stations are owned and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and are available for free public use making this technology extremely helpful for the type of data the collection we are conducting.

 

The cloud coverage today was partly cloudy and the sun was to the east, low on the horizon. Noting the location of the sun can be very helpful when going back and looking at the data to better understand and even estimate glare and shadows.

 

UAV setup:

System: DJI Matrice 600

Sensors: Zenmuse XT2 (RGB & thermal) Sony α6000

Infinity focus Aperture: F3.5 Shutter: 1/4000

 

Flight Data:

Flight 1

Altitude: 500 ft

Setup: 25 min

Takeoff: 1008

Landing: 1028

Duration: 20 min

Teardown: 15 min

 

Flight 2

Altitude: 500 ft

Setup: 17 min

Takeoff: 1109

Landing: 1130

Duration: 21 min

Teardown: 14 min

During our flight, I observed two types of errors displayed on Measure, both of which were fairly common and not overly concerning. The first was “SD Card Busy”. This occurs when the SD card on the XT2 data is taking a long time to write to the SD card. It will delay the next photo taken by the XT2 but has no effect on the Sony α6000 which operates independently. In fact, the α6000 operates almost entirely independent of the M600, it has its own system controlling it and the status cannot be monitored from the ground, so everything from Measure is about the XT2. The second error we encountered displayed as “Aircraft tilting”. I noticed this only happened when the M600 was turning to complete another pass. I believe this error was thrown out of an abundance of caution on Measure’s end. Since the M600 does not natively operate with Measure, I can only assume that Measure is unaware that this type of maneuver is normal.

 

When flying the Sony α6000 there is no easy way to determine if the photos will come out over or underexposed. The camera is always on shutter priority and we have found that 1/3200 or 1/4000 works best the majority of the time but there is no good method for verifying this at the current moment. My proposal is to send a DJI Mavic up prior to the M600 to check the conditions from the sky. The Mavics are natively set to shutter priority and can be controlled from the ground. This way we could sample photos at different shutter speeds to help determine what the α6000 should be set to. Even though they are different cameras, it would at least give us an idea of the conditions and over time we would have a good idea of how the two cameras compare.