I thought I'd checked everything for our proposed fly-in this coming weekend: airfield availability, weather, technology ready to fly. But I missed the most obvious conflict: it's MOTHER'S DAY!
Given that I've been traveling for past week and we have five little kids, you can imagine that it would earn me no points at home to leave my wife with the children again while I go flying with the boys. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to postpone this. I know that some of you are going to be coming up for the Where 2.0 conference (which I'll be speaking at), so if you've still got you heart set on flying I can probably recommend some places to do it. But I won't be able to join you.
Huge apologies for being an idiot and catching it so late. We'll reschedule for June or July.
Best,
Chris
I was primarily discussing with them applications such as population and sanitation monitoring in refugee camps. Currently, people are trying to use overhead imagery to monitor population movements/flows and housing/sanitation conditions in some of the large locations. The imagery can be expensive and hard to obtain on a consistent basis. Additionally, some interest was expressed in using UAVs for cheap, rapidly deployable platforms in disaster situations. Also, some land use (grazing) applications are being developed using overhead imagery, with some of the same hurdles (timeliness being one of them).
I will continue to poke around, which is why I am upset I won't be able to make it to the conference...was looking forward to it.
For many of the agricultural applications in the developing world, UAVs aren't actually cheaper than people, so I imagine that might be a problem for animal and public health applications, too. But we're doing our part to lower the cost!
Now I don't feel so bad. I was going to pack mine up and head out for the Where 2.0 conference and make the fly-in...although, as it stands now, my aircraft is sitting up in a 50ft. tree (long story) and some of my vet school finals were rescheduled so they overlap with the conference. Maybe next year!
Chris, also wanted to share some stories about UAV ideas from the AFRICOM conference in Stuttgart that I was at last week...companies trying to sell UAVs with all the bells and whistles to AFRICOM for crazy amounts of money. Talked with some folks regarding the veterinary and public health applications for AFRICOM, doing it cheaply, having a great development resource base like this network, and producing/utilizing UAVs sustainably with local people/resources (basically I regurgitated a lot of your thoughts, hope you don't mind). Amazingly, many of them had not even thought of the myriad of applications...however, some of the NGOs in attendance liked the concept.
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I will continue to poke around, which is why I am upset I won't be able to make it to the conference...was looking forward to it.
For many of the agricultural applications in the developing world, UAVs aren't actually cheaper than people, so I imagine that might be a problem for animal and public health applications, too. But we're doing our part to lower the cost!
Chris, also wanted to share some stories about UAV ideas from the AFRICOM conference in Stuttgart that I was at last week...companies trying to sell UAVs with all the bells and whistles to AFRICOM for crazy amounts of money. Talked with some folks regarding the veterinary and public health applications for AFRICOM, doing it cheaply, having a great development resource base like this network, and producing/utilizing UAVs sustainably with local people/resources (basically I regurgitated a lot of your thoughts, hope you don't mind). Amazingly, many of them had not even thought of the myriad of applications...however, some of the NGOs in attendance liked the concept.
Cheers,
Craig