Water wasn't supposed to have touched the lenses- we had a nice little retract built in, but that's all useless when you forget to use it:) Take-off was fully manual to prevent FBWA from attempting to correct the roll and cause uneven drag on the floats leading to out-of-control spins. The current camera is a HD19+ from Boscam, and will be converted to support NIR photography.
This drone was built by 4 Chinese students of Zhejiang Province Hangzhou No.2 middle school, under the financial support and supervision of the local Environment Protection Technology Department. This is its maiden flight, doing a simulated automated pass over a local bottled water plant, so although it flies a bit awkward right now due to unbalanced floats, it can already complete its mission without difficulties. The aircraft will be optimized to mount infrared sensors to help monitor illegal sludge dumping and Harmful Algae Blooms, which currently plague the lake in the video, Lake Qiandao,aka Thousand Islands lake. The lake is a man-made lake sitting in a mountain basin, and is an important source of income for the region, which relies completely on fishing and tourism.
The students who created this project are currently looking forward to college education in the United States. We appreciate any feedback and suggestions, as the local government is impressed with our results and is preparing to have our work further developed and deployed at similar sites province-wide.
Comments
Well done and a school project at that. That's great, keep it up guys.
@Tom Mahood I'll try to do that tomorrow. Camera-man(also the guy responsible for the video blackouts at such close range since he's the antenna tracker as well) is still on vacation and still hasn't given me any of the shots from the surface.
Nice video but how about posting a picture of the aircraft itself? I'm sure people would like to see how it was done.