How to shorten the life of your multi rotor

A recent article published by National Geographic included a video shot from DJI Phantom quadrotor  aerial cameras.  Sam Cossman and a team of explorers flew the Phantoms over the active Marum Crater volcano in Vanuatu.  The caldera is 12km wide, exceedingly hot, and contains toxic and corrosive gases.

The footage is spectacular, but two multi rotors were lost in collecting the images.  It is well worthwhile following the link above to view the video.  Cossman explains that the images will assist scientists in understanding the volcano.

Cossman claims that there is microbial life on the rocks close to the boiling lava.  When the rock cools to below 120 C it is considered to be a habitable environment, and the scientists are very interested in studying the colonisation of the newly cooled rocks.

Yet another interesting item to come out of the National Geographic video is the 3-D model of the caldera produced from thousands of images processed by an unnamed software package.  The AUT UAV team uses Pix4Mapper to produce orthomosaics of their images for further study.

Currently, the greatest risk to the longevity of our multi rotors is the training of new pilots and application of the technology near to trees or bodies of water!

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The Fox is watching Grass Grubs

The wonderful people at Skycam UAV who build and supply our UAVs have been surveying a local farm.

Grass Grubs are the larvae of the bronze beetle Eucolaspsis brunnea, and eat the roots of pasture grasses, causing significant damage and thus loss of productivity on New Zealand farms.  Since the damage can be seen by the naked eye, it was suggested that the Fox UAV could be used to assess the extent of infestation of the farm and thus help in planning eradication measures.

 The Skycam team visited the farm and flew their Fox over the affected areas and collected a large number of photographs.  Coincidentally, Skycam UAV was approached by Simactive, a company providing photogrammetry software, offering to process a set of images as a demonstration of their product's capability.

 Skycam sent a sub-set of the images (50) to Simactive, who processed them into an orthomosaic.  The result is shown below


Even to the untrained eye, it is obvious that the grass is severely damaged in this paddock and would provide little feed for sheep or cattle set to graze on it.

 Since the images are georeferenced, the farmer can use the mosaic to plan treatment of the affected areas, though it is apparently difficult to treat established pasture 

(see http://www.pggwrightsonseeds.com/uploads/Forage%20Focus%20No%2014%20Grass%20Grub.pdf)

This is another example of the non-military use of UAVs and the way our research may benefit New Zealand.
Thanks to Skycam UAV for providing the images and to Simactive for producing the orthomosaic.

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