Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) is a very broad topic.
Part of my role as a student innovation fellow is to build and experiment with UAS, with the goal of developing a “Manual” for UAS use at Georgia State.
The manual will include both safety and technical information, as well as some basic flight instruction and guidelines for use.
To that end, my post today will consist of a pretty “stream of consciousness” discussion of what is available and what is possible with unmanned aerial systems in a University setting. I will also go over the differences in the various types of UAS and their pros and cons. The reason I ask this is, is that I have a somewhat narrow focus when it comes to the use of these aircraft. I want to know what sort of ideas you can come up for using Unmanned Aerial Systems in a University setting.
Aerial Photography or Videography is the primary use of most UAS in academic or research settings. There are many different variations on this role. Cinematographers and photographers have been using UAS to achieve an airborne perspective with low cost in many fields including journalism, entertainment and real estate. Other Colleges and Universities are using them on sports fields to analyze athletic performance from a new perspective. Governments and utilities have used cameras in the air to perform critical infrastructure inspections, and still others have used small unmanned aircraft to survey large swaths of land with high resolution aerial imagery.
It’s by changing the actual imaging sensor used to take images that the capabilities of unmanned aerial systems start to diversify. Simple photography uses a Red-Green-Blue color representation in “Natural Color” imagery, but the electromagnetic spectrum is very wide and visible or natural colors only make up a small portion of that. NIR or Near-Infrared imagery is one of the simplest to acquire. NIR light is that band immediately adjacent to red but beyond the human visual spectrum. NIR reflectivity can be used to help assess plant type or health, and is widely used in environmental and agricultural research. Typical off the shelf consumer cameras are often capable of recording the NIR band with the removal of a simple filter, however the inconsistencies from one model to the next and one filter to the next make these less than ideal for scientific research. A small cottage industry in NIR modified cameras has developed, targeting scientific researchers with inexpensive but consistently and correctly modified cameras.
Moving further away from visible/natural light you come to Thermal IR. Even though its still Infrared, Thermal IR cannot be easily captured by a consumer camera. Thermal IR is also known as Thermal Radiation or just “Heat”. Thermal IR sensors are much more expensive than NIR. These cameras allow the operator of a UAS to view temperature differences. This is useful in a number of fields, such as wildlife management or infrastructure inspection. Other than the cost of the sensors, these capabilities are essentially just specialized applications of aerial photography.
Mapping can also take on another dimension, when the aerial imagery is used not only to build an orthophoto mosaic of the land being mapped, but also to reconstruct a 3D model of the terrain. This is the primary use of Unmanned Aerial Systems for me, however I realize that many of you will have many more ideas for how to use these systems to further interesting projects that you come up with.
As for the types of systems, there are two primary types of aircraft in use for UAS, and their capabilities, advantages and disadvantages are similar to their full size manned counterparts. Fixed wing UAS look like a traditional plane or “drone” with a propeller for thrust and wings for lift. Like a traditional helicopter, a multirotor spins a propeller in order to generate thrust. A multirotor then changes the vector of that thrust to generate motion, both horizontally and vertically.
A fixed wing UAS is the go to solution for any application where any of the following are of overriding concern: Flight time, Power efficiency, Range, and straight line speed. For large aerial surveys or other long range, long duration missions a fixed wing provides a significantly more robust platform. Because the wing generates lift through forward motion, fixed wing UAS are generally unable to hover, but because that forward motion is what keeps the vehicle in the air, they are much more efficient than multirotors when it comes to power use/flight time.
A multirotor is going to be most useful where extremely accurate and precise maneuverability are needed over all else. Because a multirotor uses thrust to move both horizontally and vertically, it’s possible to ascend vertically as well as hover and strafe from side to side. This allows for extremely accurate and precise camera control in 3D space.
So, there you have it.
I’d love to hear what ideas you all have for using these systems.
Hi Andrew,
Great post. This looks like interesting and worthwhile work. I am wondering, though, especially in light of this week’s GSU induced bomb-scare on the interstate, about the security issues involved in working with UAS’s in urban space. Are you going to have to develop protocols for dealing with security issues, and if so, how will they shape and limit what kind of work people will be able to do with them?
To be quite frank, the thought has weighed on my mind heavily in the few days since that incident. The potential is indeed huge, both for media induced panicking overreaction as well as actual physical harm.
The fact is that one of the current stated goals of the UAS project within the SIF program is to develop safety protocols and procedures for deploying these platforms within urban space. The security concerns are going to have to be addressed on a project by project basis, but fortunately as an anthropologist I actually have training in identifying and negotiating with stakeholders in a research setting. It’s something we do all the time as archaeologists, and it’s incredibly important to our research. To that end I’m also intending to develop some basic guidelines for “stakeholder discovery” that can be used to identify individuals and organizations which may be impacted by UAS deployments. This will allow a project to identify and contact those who may be impacted by the deployment as a formal stage of the deployment “best practices” checklist. This document will only be a guideline. Other departments within the university have and will continue to operate UAS with or without SIF graduate fellows assisting. The best I can hope to do at this point is to make available my best recommendations for how to deploy unmanned aerial systems responsibly.
I love that you have opened this dialog, as I was also involved with an introductory level use of UAS this past summer with the undergraduate research experience. Although I can see such potential in its use, I also fear the level of drawbacks that seem to be associated.
One potential use could be discovering and examining the level at which private and public gardens are being used in the city. There is a study done in Chicago (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/01/08/168895084/finding-chicago-s-hidden-farms) that used Google Earth images to create a comprehensive account of farms and gardens in the city. For my own research I also used google imagery to identify sites, but because of the time of year the images were taken my analysis was limited (difficult to assess gardens in the winter months).
On the other hand, UAS are not bound by certain dates or times of year and could really expand much of the assessment being done with Google Earth imagery. That being said, I also know that using these UAS can be perceived has more invasive than satellite imagery and again could become an issue of security.
Atlanta’s police and fire department already have full plates with other urban related drama without adding to it because of scared neighbors or retrievals of UAS in trees or tops of buildings (or cameras attached to bridges). To take it to another level are the issues of national security- UAS flying onto the White House’s front lawn, or wandering into Hartsfield/Jackson airspace.
I am definitely torn, because as an academic and researcher I find the potential of UAS to be truly revolutionary technology. But as a resident, I do not want my neighbor’s teen to be able to fly his UAS up into my fenced in backyard, looking into my window (a problem a friend of mine had around Christmas).
Don’t know how much this comment helps, but I thought I would add at least my personal experiences.
Nicole, I was thinking about how I was going to reply to this… with lots of speculation about how to mitigate this issue. It seems that the FAA has made that decision for me. Moving forward, flying over someone’s land without their permission is not permitted under the FAA proposed guidelines. This does not preclude someone, in the scenario you describe above, from flying over their own property and imaging you through your window, just as it would not preclude them from seeing into your room if they, say, climbed a tree in their own yard. The solution the federal government envisions your friend implement here is decidedly low tech and has nothing to do with FAA policy: curtains.
Is this the right way to go about it? We will see…
Nice post on this stuff. My friend got a new Phantom Drone for Christmas (but its more for his dad who actually did stuff with RC a long time ago), but he was going to use it more for film making or other interesting shots, dunno about that yet.
That offer for surveying a couple of GSU buildings is still up I believe. All you need is to say the word and that department will fix up all the forms.
This post reminded me to go check out the Natural Science Center for Arduino, so thanks for that man. Also, I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not, but here is a hilarious Reddit post a few weeks back:
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/2u3mp3/the_last_thing_you_want_to_see_falling_out_of/
Hope to see new things with this tech soon!
That is a great image… Did you see the video I posted over the Holidays?
The Phantom is pretty good. We have at least 3 that I know of on campus. All three have crashed at least once (see the disassemble log I put together of the Library Phantom).
Was it the one with the camera already on it?
Nah, it was just the regular trainer one.
Also, I’m sure you’ve already read the news, but for other people who haven’t the FAA has released new protocols for drone use.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/02/15/faa-drone-rule/23440469/
That’s the best news article I could find. However, I haven’t found any white papers by the FAA that explain the process of authorizing drone use. The rules are pretty lax though. Just gotta make sure its nowhere near state or federal airspace and any passenger planes.
Bad news though, robot drones from Amazon won’t be coming :C
A lot of the work that I do focuses around community-based, participatory methods. Specifically, I use my skills as a geographer and cartographer to address questions that a particular community may have. Let me break this down a little bit…
“Participatory”: In the 1990’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) researchers and other academics examined the ways in which GIS methods were so far removed from public conversations, and they wanted to make GIS more inclusive. Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) emerged as a research methodology to make GIS more inclusive, specifically focusing on including members of the pubic in the collection of GIS data.
“Community-based”: In my work, this term does not just mean that the research it taken outside of the walls of academia, but that it actually engages communities to work side by side with me in asking and answering questions about space. I do not elicit the help of a community to answer a question that I alone have produced (which is often what PPGIS does), I am recruited by communities to assist in answering the questions THEY have with the skills and resources I have available to me as a student.
So I say all this to lead up to the question of: Is there any work being done to apply these same types of community-based, participatory methods to UAS? My suspicion is that there would be a lot of interest by community partners if they were given the opportunity to engage with this technology.
You know, archaeology has gone through a similar series of transformations.
In archaeology the terms are things like public archaeology (being focused on disseminating historical knowledge to “the public”) and community archaeology (being focused on questions posed by “the community”).
I think one of the things I have taken away from the way that debate unfolded in my field is that you have to be wary of the creation of a single public with these methods. Too often it’s easy to see all the people not in your own field as a monolith, rather than as individuals and groups. This may seem like a cop out, but the power of this is that you can, to an extent “universalize” the methods used to improve the quality of community engagement to improve all sorts of research by refining what specific public you are intending to engage. Are you going for other Participatory GIScientists? Are you looking to engage your committee? What about wider (non GEOS) social science? All of those, you could apply those principles of engagement and intent in action to improve the quality of your resulting work. There is no one right public to address. How you decide your intended audience, and how to engage with them will depend on a number of factors not least of which is personal preference.
The way one of my favorite archaeologists, Randall McGuire, put it is that we need to get on with the business of doing archaeology and not debate over who is asking the proper questions. Instead he advocates acting with recognition and intent of the public which you are addressing. McGuire really wants archaeologists to act as “subject matter experts” who can lend the weight of western scientific authority to history of people, peoples and events often left out of the “official” accounts. But that doesn’t invalidate other inquiries, so long as the intent is clear and all involved are informed.
Anyways, to answer your question, yes.
mdpi.com/1999-4907/5/6/1481/pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=IP2bQySyjcs
theguardian.com/world/2014/may/07/drones-striking-a-high-tech-blow-for-conservation-and-the-environment
forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/25/potential-drone-use-finding-rivers-of-blood/
thewire.com/national/2011/12/occupy-wall-street-has-drone-occucopter/45891/
reuters.com/article/2011/12/25/us-australia-japan-whaling-idUSTRE7BO01K20111225
eijournal.com/news/industry-insights-trends/brazil-hopes-drones-will-help-nab-environmental-crooks
oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2011/05/oregon_nurseries_explore_unman.html
If you are interested in pursuing this type of work I am extremely interested in continuing this dialogue with you off line on how we can establish a more concrete collaboration. I have a lot of ideas.