Experience With UAS

  Sep 29, 2020 Week 5 Field Report Group 2: Jesse Giampaolo, Nick Dayton, Cole Bramel AT 409 UAS Capstone Course 9/22/2020   Martell Forest missions status:   This week and next, flight groups will be working to get cleared to fly the M600. The leaves are expected to start changing next week and it is essential to start collecting data beginning this week. Next week we should be cleared to fly. Cole is not in attendance today due to potential exposure to covid. All notes and this report was shared with him.   PWA Search and Rescue Simulation:   In an effort to get more mock search and rescue missions logged, William Weldon supervised two groups (myself included) through a number of iterations today. William hid the “body” which consisted of a red shirt and jeans. One group conducted the flight while the other analyzed the images. After the UAV was grounded, the flight crew packed it up and then became the ground search crew. The image analy...

  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 ...

  Sep 14, 2020 Memorandum   To: Dr. Joseph Hupy From: Cole Bramel  Date: September 8th, 2020  Subject: Week One Field Notes For this week’s lab, my group was unable to perform a dry run of the setup, flight, and takedown of the drone. The positive was that my group got to watch all other flight groups perform a simple mission and go through the breakdown and setup of the drone. This lets our team observe multiple times what to do right and what those teams did wrong while following along in the checklist. we witnessed teams try and switch steps around and Hupy explaining why the steps were in the order that they were. The teams then asked if it was okay to optimize the checklist for our crew's workflows. There was encouragement for each crew to find what order works for them as long as all the steps remain intact. There were also ideas of adding more steps into the checklist because there were some things that the students needed to ch...

  Sep 7, 2020 Memorandum   To: Dr. Joseph Hupy From: Cole Bramel  Date:  September 1st , 2020  Subject: Week One Field Notes On September 1 st , our the class was able to witness the operations of the Bramor fixed wing as well as the setup for a search and rescue. During this operation, we witnessed the crew go through a preflight checklist as well as the setup, launch, flight, and recovery of the aircraft. We also discussed some important details to keep in mind while the drone is in flight and what to do in an emergency. We then got to watch the M600 run a short mission. We learned that the camera on the Bramor was a Sony Rx1 with a 35mm lens. The settings for the camera were, a F-stop of 4.5, an ISO of 100, and a shutter of 1/1600. When the planned mission was over, the team showed us what the recovery was like. The aircraft returned to the field in front of the team and began to loiter until it was at a low enough altitude that the...

  Aug 31, 2020 Memorandum   To: Dr. Joseph Hupy From: Cole Bramel  Date: August 31st, 2020  Subject: Week One Field Notes On August 25 th , our class was able to witness the operations of the Bramor fixed-wing. During this the operation we witnessed the crew go through a preflight checklist as well as the setup, launch, flight, and recovery of the aircraft. We also discussed some important details to keep in mind while the drone is in flight and what to do in an emergency. We then got to watch the M600 fly and all of us got to work the duel RGB-thermal cameras. When we first went approached to the operation area, the flight crew pointed out that they like to set up a pseudo blockade with the carrying cases of the Bramor to keep civilians out of the operation area. They then told us a story of a civilian chipping a wingtip by accidentally brushing against it. After this, they started to go through a preflight checklist. This consisted o...

Ground control points are large marked targets on the ground, spaced strategically throughout your area of interest. If you use ground control points with your aerial map, you first need to determine the GPS coordinates at the center of each. The ground control points and their coordinates are then used to help drone mapping software accurately position your map in relation to the real world around it.  It might be helpful to think of your GCPs as a series of thumbtacks placed on your drone map. Because the drone mapping software knows the exact location of each of these “thumbtacks”, it can reference their locations when it matches up all of the other points on the map.  When used correctly, ground control points greatly improve the global accuracy of your drone map. They help ensure that the latitude and longitude of any point on your map correspond accurately with actual GPS coordinates. This is important in situations where precision mapping and true global accuracy ar...

Introduction Lab 8's goal was to teach us how to classify different surfaces so that they can be automatically defined with the program. For this, we used a tutorial on the learn ArcGIS website. the purpose of defining different surfaces is to show where different things are using brighter, more contrasting colors.  Process This tutorial started off with giving us the premade images that we used for the reclassification.  The image provided for this project is a raster dataset which allows it to be easily manipulated in ArcGIS. The first part of the manipulation is to use the raster function that extracts the bands of the different surfaces of the image. Next, we want to group up the pixels of each differing band to make them easier to classify. for this, we use the classification wizard. This takes similar bands and softens the edges to make them more visible. Then we start to classify similar bands into manmade and natural which we call impervious and pervious. T...