For those who dont know ASPRS, is The American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. 

On their 2013 Annual conference call for abstracts, gladly they included Unmanned Aerial Vehicles!!

And here we go! After almost  3 years of developing, breaking, breaking... and more breaking.. we managed to succesfully build a rig to fullfil our needs and also, translate hundreds of Precision Agriculture formulas and models to GIS-Automated rutines!

This extraordinary alchemy of UAS construction, GIS, Agriculture and Aerial Mapping, will be presented as a paper at 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm, Wednesday, March 27th  in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles session. The Conference will take place at Baltimore, Maryland USA -  Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel.

Creation of a Remote Sensing Unmanned Aerial System
(UAS) for Precision Agriculture and Related Mapping
Applications
Dimitrios Stefanakis(Me), University of the Aegean, Greece
John Hatzopoulos, Margaris Nikolaos, and Danalatos Nikolaos

Abstract:

Our goal is to create a fully autonomous airborne remote sensing platform, for the production of various vegetation indices to determine growth, development, yield crop and provide considerable information in real time and at low cost (compared with existing methods) for the study area.

The primary tool for extraction and production of the information is an unmanned aerial system (UAS) that carries sensors and cameras flying over the study area, transmitting real time data that has been programmed to collect. The collected data is land cover, geographic location, weather data, geomorphologic and cadastral data, ortho-corrected derivatives and qualitative data type coverage, biomass and other parameters that have been introduced to the platform via computational GIS routines.

This idea emerged during the analysis of the functional ecology in Greek agro-ecosystems within spatial information and mapping. To take full advantage of dynamic tools of IT, such as Geographic Information Systems and Expert Systems, Global Positioning Systems, Remote Sensing and Agriculture Engineering tools.

The platform named "Skiptrovamon" has numerous applications and is used as a tool in many scientific fields, such as; precision agriculture, geography, geomorphology, topography, urban geography, and remote sensing.

Skiptrovamon was designed and has been tested as remote sensing platform for precision agriculture. As the aircraft flies over the study area it collects information from cropland and outputs, yield crop, current biomass, indicate the stressed plants and possible lack or adequate irrigation and fertilization in real time through computational routines.

Key words: UAS, UAV, Skiptrovamon, agriculture, remote sensing, GIS

We would never be able to do anything, if APM, and this communtity didnt provide us the tools!! 

Once again, i need your backup!  if you are arround i definetly need a supportive audience and also meet some of you in person (Living in Greece doesnt make meetings easy :) ). 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank, UcanDrone Team: Nikos G Gerarchakis, Major of Hellenic Army Corps of Engineers, Apostolos Gadetsakis, Senior Officer Telecommunications Engineer of the Hellenic Air Force and Stefanos Nasos, Sail plane pilot, Test pilot of the Team, for providing us the tools to construct and test the prototype aircrafts of this study.

We owe a great thanks to DIYDrones.com community and APM developers team, for providing certain solutions to our needs, free software and helping us thru the integration process.

More info, for the Construction, Paper etc, will follow after the presentation!