Hi – I have been flying IRIS+ for a few months, mainly to get an understanding of UAV’s as tools for environmental survey and monitoring as well as of course being cool exciting technology. As an ecologist and GIS user I am imagining lots of opportunities for working at the end of a RC transmitter. I have made many orthophotos that have proved the tools work and could be the basis for habitat classification etc.. I now have a definite task that I’m looking for some advice with.
I am involved with a coastal sheep grazing project in order to re-establish heath on what are currently bracken covered sea slope and cliffs. I hope to establish monitoring with both regular and IR photo monitoring. I would hope to repeat this twice yearly for at least 5 years with analysis done with a variety of GIS tools. I am just about finished in building the kit, just waiting for some photographic filters in the post. I am using a pair of identical Canon cameras running CHDK on a hard working IRIS+ drone.
Here is a link to the area I am working on - HERE - which is 1.5km of difficult to access north facing slope immediately adjacent to the sea. My plan is to have maybe 20 x 10m diameter areas that I make repeated very low level (high resolution) photographical + IR survey to monitor the change in vegetation composition.
The challenges are that my take off point is higher than the areas I want to survey so everything would require planning in negative altitude, the cliffs are very steep in places so may require altering the altitude whilst within the survey area and I am uncertain of the accuracy of the elevation information I have (taken from contour data). There are also the usual battery time issues so I would expect to be looking at maybe 5 independent flights.
Does anyone know about using absolute altitude (as opposed to relative) in flight planning and about the use of sonar in maintaining elevation? Would it be possible to rely on sonar to maintain constant 6m altitude in such terrain? Also do people have experience of adding missions together to perform complex missions where speed would vary dramatically eg 1.5m/s low altitude surveys over small areas then jumping at normal speed to the next survey site? I am hoping to achieve this without scripting if at all possible.
Twin camera mount:
Thanks in advance for your thoughts
David Tipping
Replies
Sure!
Hi David, interesting camera set up, a couple of questions:
1) How heavy is the load & what sort of flight times are you getting off the iris+ with this setup?
2) You are using dual camera for what purpose?
p.s interesting works too..
Regards
It’s a work in progress at the moment. It clocks in at 445g which is heavier than I would like. Having spoken to 3DR they recommend that load carried should not exceed 75% throttle on hovering. This sits at around 78% on a still day. There are options for me to lose some weight, it was the principle I was developing and testing.
The second camera is to be fitted with a filter that enables me to capture infrared light - see HERE
As for flight times I don’t know yet as I’m still waiting for the bits to complete the camera conversion however I have flown a similar weight - a 420g bat detector and that gave me 12+ mins. I will post when I have it all working.
I am using the IRIS+ to learn techniques and to see what is achievable. I will probably move to a larger frame with a bit more power and redundancy at some point.
The height is relative. Where you take of from is ground zero. I have no idea if negative values can be input. I know that each waypoint can have it's own height. (Mission Planner, Tower)
Thanks John - I think the answer is to get more height info by doing initial flights to gather data - see Pall Tamas reply further down. I have built a DEM from contour and point height data that i have done initial mission planning on. I translate this into negative altitude and it is ok but to improve this with actual point cloud info if i can work out how to do this would be awesome...
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