During our latest mission, we went to Ethiopia to map malaria hotspots. The idea is to look for small water bodies which in the dry season are a source for mosquitos and their larvae. From these hotspots, the mosquitos spread in the rainy season all over the region, and if infected by the malaria parasite can do a lot of damage to the local community. I have done several demonstration flights and trained local students on how to operate the UAV.  During one mission we can map an area of 2km2 on a resolution of 7cm. The plane is an USENSE-X8 running APM2.5 with 10000Mah 3S batteries on a 900kv motor and a 13*8 prop. The camera is a canon s100, running CDHK which we trigger via USB. The imagery were processed using a Pix4D discovery license, which is free, and which create wonderful fly-throughs. I am especially happy with the way Pix4D is processing the 3D structure of vegetation. Much better than other SfM software I have seen thus far.

Now the students are processing all the imagery and looking into performing these flights on their own. This project is part of a series of development projects funded by the Flemish government (VLIR-UOS) where universities of Belgium collaborate with institutes in the South to exchange knowledge with each other. 

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  • I will do both.. thanks for the suggestion! 

  • Great! We need pilots like you. Pls make sure to sign up at air-vid.com
  • Nice job, Dries, you should shared this with the UAViators-Core Team.

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