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
Comments
Great Rai, keep up. :-D
Eduardo, you should do a blog post. Sounds interesting. We are always interested in gaining efficiency.
bth .. for 300ha i use my little 140cm flywing. Its a toy compared to mine big flywing.
Marcus, my wing fly around 24m/s. Because the use of airspeed sensor the ground speed will change.
As i say before, i tell it fly 120km in good conditions.
100km is easy.
My first 2.2m wing fly only 40-50km. The second one fly around 87km.
I am in the 3th model and it have lots of improvements.
If you fly at 15 m/s it would take 2000 s to go 30 km. That's 33 min per rail. Four rails would take about 2 hours. This could be possible with 20 Ahr batteries and light winds and light camera/gimbal. I suspect the plane has a fairly high wing loading but not impossible. You are most likely on the edge of doable.
Rai, i using an 2.6m flywing with 20amp baterry.
It fly easy 100km. In good days it fly more than 120km.
This is a 2 year research.
I have a gaser version too that fly much more.
For example, i fly 4 rail of 30km. Each rail if 250m away. This give me 30km x 1km.
i get 30km² with 50% overlap but it work only if you got a good 2d gimbal.
Without gimbal the mosaicing can fail
Hi Rai
Hehe... he may fly a turbine jet to cover such a big area. I'm quite sure is a typo. My Skywalker also fly at 300 meter AGL using Canon S100GPS will cover 300 Ha in about 40 minutes flight.
You can try Agisoft which offer great discount to academic. Your trichoter certainly is very interesting. This is the best flight time I know so far for a 4S 5000 battery. My DJI F550 with stock set up only last for 8 minutes with camera and gimbal.
Hi Keeyan,
Thanks for your comment! Yes, we try to obey the law and try to keep things cool with what we do. But indeed we are engaging in promoting what we call spatial transparency so we definitely have to deal with authorities here. This is actually part of our political-ecology research as well as our engagement with local communities. Yeah, me too, I am curious about the 30 km2 per flight. If I am not mistaken then it's 3,000 Hectares in one mission at 300 AGL. That sounds really fantastic and I definitely would like to learn about the system. You too Keeyan, great job with Conservation Drones and keep up the great work there.
Great job Rai. But please be a little caution with various authorities there. I am curious if 30 KM2 is a typo instead of 3 KM2.
Hi Marcus,
thanks for the input and yeah.. we realize that risk on lipos as well when we monitor the battery's power on MP. We haven't weighed the copter yet, but will do before the mission flight tomorrow. thanks again
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