Blogs

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