Nov 2, 2020

 

AT 409 FIELD REPORT

 

Unmanned Aerial Systems Capstone I

 

Purdue University

 

Fall 2020

 

Week 10: 10/26-11/2

 

 

Group 2

 

Jesse Giampaolo, Nick Dayton, Cole Bramel

Context

 

AT 40900 is the first part of the Unmanned Aerial Systems Capstone for seniors enrolled in the UAS program at Purdue University. As a class, we are currently tracking the foliage as it changes color and eventually drops at Martell Forest from the end of September through late October or early November. This data will hopefully help Aish (Forestry Ph.D. student) and Dr. Hupy (AT 409 professor) achieve species and genotype level identification of the trees at Martell. Zach and Will (UAS grad students) are also helping with this project to show that such identification can be accomplished with UAS collected data.

 

To achieve the data collection this semester, the At 409 class has been broken down into groups consisting of three students each and as a class is collaborating to collect data from a minimum of three missions per week. For this research, the more missions the better the data set will be (ideally). A mission consists of two successful flights over the two different plots of interest (NW & NE) at Martell using a DJI Matrice 600 equipped with a Zenmuse XT2 and a Sony α6000 (Figure 1). The North-West plot consists of naturally occurring oak and other trees. The North-East plot consists of 10-12-year-old precision planted red oak trees that have been professionally maintained (Figure 2).

Figure 1: DJI Matrice 600 equipped w/ Zenmuse XT2 & Sony α6000

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Figure 2: The mission area - precision planted and regularly maintained red oak plot

 

 

Week 10 Overview

 

Two flights were conducted in week 10, with varying levels of success. The first flight of the week occurred on Tuesday 10/27 with group two, Kaleb Gould, and Dr. Hupy. After the flight on Tuesday 10/27, Dr. Hupy informed the class through Microsoft Teams that going forward the shutter speed on the Sony A600 should be either 1/3200 or 1/2500 to avoid overexposure. The second flight was performed on Wednesday 10/28 with crew four and Dr. Hupy also present. After the flight, Dr. Hupy informed the class through Microsoft Teams that there would be some slight adjustments to data collection settings: all flights must now use a shutter speed of 1/2500, 85% lateral overlap for the Northwest Martell plot, and 80% lateral overlap for the Northeast Martell plot. Crew three planned to fly on Monday 10/26, but had to cancel due to illness.

 

Week 10 Planned Flight: 10/22/2020

 

Prior to the flight, in the lab, it was decided to try out two new sets of batteries while flying and compare their depletion percentages to older battery sets. The battery sets brought to the field were the orange, green, and beige batteries. Group two was missing Cole Bramel this week due to COVID-19 quarantine restrictions, so Jesse and Nick drove out with Dr. Hupy to the field. At the gate, they unexpectedly met Kaleb Gould (another AT 409 student), who was there to conduct another mission that had gotten canceled due to weather restrictions.

The first flight took off at 1015 EDT using the green batteries over the Northwest plot. Upon landing, it was discovered that the Sony A600 wasn’t connected to the PPK, and no pictures were taken during the flight. This created a faulty trigger log in the SD card for the first flight. After changing out batteries, the second flight took off with the orange batteries over the Northeast Plot.

Figure 4: METAR for KLAF as of 1054 EDT 10/22/2020

Failure to Process

This week we ran into a few errors both in the field and during processing.

Since Cole was in quarantine this week, he did all the processing remotely. It was found out that one of the PPKs trigger logs had accidentally been deleted during transfer. It was found that the other log when compared to the number of pictures that were taken, had several disparities.

 

The number of photos was different, none of the times lined up, and the triggers did not follow the usual pattern of a normal flight. Cole discussed possible solutions with Zach Miller and they came to the conclusion that sorting the data would be difficult and that without the data from the other plot it wouldn't be of much use.

 

The issues with the misaligned PPK data stems from issues encountered in the field. The PPK had a red light come on once. Another time we forgot to plug the PPK in all together and had to refly the NE plot. This caused confusion with the PPK logs when offloading data. In the future, we will keep all logs no matter how certain we are until the data has been processed.