http://vimeo.com/105579612

Dear All,

Just returned back from the field and somehow one of our works is documented and filmed. This work is part of our larger research on the political-ecology of river in Borneo where land-use change and forest change is part of the research. The lack of the reliable, high-resolution and accessible map for the local communities, NGOs even for governmental offices at local level has been one of the problem contributing to the mess of spatial planning in Indonesia which has lead to the land-tenure conflicts and deforestation. We were at some places in Indonesia to do our research on understanding this rapid transformation and part of it is using DIY drones (we call it MaTA, it is the shortening of UAV in Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesia), while it means also The Eyes).

The film is called "Dayaks and Drones" and as far as I understand it has been screened during the Indigenous People meeting in New York last September (I was still in the rainforest by that time :)). Dayaks are the indigenous communities living in Borneo (Indonesia and Malaysia). There are hundreds of Dayak sub-tribes thus hundreds of completely different languages. The Dayaks are the people well-known as the Forest Farmers and Forest Protectors (they use forest and its surrounding wisely). They prefer to live in the upstream of the river deep down in the forest and they usually live in a longhouse (consists of several "apartments" ). They have their customary laws to protect their customary forest. One of the Dayak sub-tribes, The Iban, is well-known by their tattoo culture, one of the most beautiful in the world.

We will continue our mission again early next year and this time still some (lots) of works in Borneo but we also will go to Papua and Sumatera where the forest (and of course the people and other species) are also having high-pressure from some expansions of various activities. We work together and established what we call at the moment as "Community Drones" where we teach mostly the young people of the local communities how to develop and use the drones and the maps / video they get to protect their area/forest/ecosystem in the way with  more detail, more accurate and more accessible spatial data. At the moment we use both multicopter (sometimes the forest is just too dense) and fixed-wing.

We would definitely like to thanks this forum for all the inspirations and spirits and knowledge of course also to some people that have been keen on supporting in many ways : Chris of 3D, Ed (Peace Drone is an amazing airframe! we will use it for sure), Conservation Drone, Nguyen (for helping a lot with the FX-61 settings), Flight Riot (for the amazing amount of information in mapping with UAV).

Thanks again,

Best,

R

Dear all: Thanks lot for all the insights, time, information and most importantly is the spirit that you all share here in DIY Drones. It is just a quick post as I am still in Borneo and not having too good internet connection. We just want to share a short (unprofessionally made) clip that we (hardly) tried to make. I hope it will give you all some information on how far (or how slow) we are now in trying to keep the work going.

Enjoy,

Best,

Rai

Dear all,

We would like to report our progress in using drones (what we call "community drones") to support community mapping (customary forest etc.) and community struggle for their land. As some of you have probably heard or been informed that rapid land use change has been happening in Borneo due to various large scale activities [i.e. oil palm plantations, mining and logging]. These activities has partly been the driving forces of deforestation which is happening in Indonesia. However, deforestation is not the only "problem" we are tackling and interested at solving. One of the fundamental problems is the dispossession of local community members (indigenous people if you like) from their land without their consent. 

The above picture is developed from around 80 pictures taken by Canon SX 260 HS, stitched with Microsoft ICE. This picture shows the dried lake [it was still a lake some 3 years ago] turned into oil palm plantation which has caused severe environmental degradation [lost of fishing ground, dried peatland thus more green house gasses emission and social problems]. With the above picture, we are going to support the community members to have their land back and to obtain back their rights to manage their land. The tricopter was able to fly for about 18 minutes [from take off to landing] at the altitude of 250 meters above the ground. We use the 1000 kv brushless motor with 10x5 propellers and 5,000 mAh 3S battery and 30 Amp. ESC. We use APM 2.6 and arducopter as flight controller and Mission Planner at the ground station. With this configuration, we are able to map around 30 Hectares of an area. 

We just finish building another Tricopter with 360 kv brushless motor with 17" propellers and have it tested today bringing Canon S100 camera with 5000 mAh, 4S lipo battery and 18 Amp. ESCs. We are able to fly for 38 minutes. We hope to do mapping customary forest in Papua by tomorrow and expecting larger area coverage.Hope this is useful for some of you and we are looking forward to some inputs and exchange of experiences as well as to learn from you all.

Thanks and best regards,

Community Drones Team

Hi All

We would like to share some pictures and stories from our work in Borneo using DIY Tricopter and flying wing with APM for mapping community forest (village forest and customary forest) purpose. We also aim at mapping the land use change at certain areas due to the establishment of large-scale plantation [mostly oil palm] and large scale mining [mostly bauxite and coal] which have impacted the state of the ecosystem [including the life of the people]. The longest river in Indonesia, Kapuas, has been impacted severely by such activities. We hope that UAVs might provide a solution to monitor the rapid ecosystem change thus might provide a little support to the decision making process towards the better condition [i.e. curbing deforestation] as well as provide a little support to the local community members to sustain their forests. 

Our Tricopters are able to fly for 17 minutes [hovering] with a 3 cells Lipo battery of 5,000 mAh [25 C discharge] with Canon SX 230 HS attached for taking continuous picture to be stitched. We have been able to map about 40 Hectares of an area with such combination. We aim at covering larger area with our flying wing. The area of community forests are usually around 1,000 to 5,000 Hectares. We use Mission Planner to plan our mission before we go to the mapping area. We aim at further encouraging the community members' participation in this process, while maintaining the safety of the whole project. We build our DIY tricopters and flying wings to minimize our cost as we are researchers without really support from some funding agencies nor from any other organizations.

We sometimes face difficulties with the landscape as some of the areas are very hilly [with some mountains around]. We haven't found perfect solutions for such difficulties yet, however we have already some ideas to overcome such challenges.But as you all know, one of the biggest challenges is the flight time [power] of the drone. We hope to have some supports [idea, etc.] to overcome such challenges. In the near future, we will start to map the islands of Karimata [West Kalimantan] to support the eco-tourism initiative which was established some months ago. We have managed to capture some videos as well as some aerial images [with GoPro 3 Black] of the archipelago which we will soon upload. One of the future aims is to map the reef cover in some of the islands and try to analyse the results. We are aiming at having kind of first overview on the health of the reef. We have no idea yet if it is possible, but let's see. interesting wind Wind is really the challenge in doing such work.

Thank you for all your share in this forum which have been the source of our knowledge and our inspiration [of course beside some of the youtube channels like rcexplorer, flightriot, the experimental airlines, mygeekshow]. Also thank you very much for the hard works of the MP team. Thanks for your time to read, we hope to have some ideas and inputs from all of you and to continue this work.

Best wishes,

on behalf of the team