Field Update - October 30th

This field outing was an extension of the work in the last blog post. Essentially, a few key adjustments were made to the same operational area. The flight plans were adjusted to cover the entire area. Using telemetry logs from the last flight, we identified where radio control signal was lost and where the aircraft resorted to a fail-safe return to home mode. By understanding this geospatial information, we readjusted the flight plans so that launch sites and crew spots will remain in visual and radio line of sight the entire time, essentially minimizing the odds of more lost link events. The flight plan became four almost equal flights with operations in each corner of the woodlot. This shrunk the flight area per flight and decreased the total distance between the aircraft and pilot.

During these operations, I acted as pilot. In all cases I flew the missions and other members acted as communications and observer crews. Ryan Ferguson acted as a second flight crew flying geospatial video missions. His aircraft utilized DJI Light-Bridge technology. The advantage of his system is he could actively operate out of a single launch spot utilizing the network of observers. Light-Bridge does not suffer from the same radio telemetry issues as the H520. We coordinated flights so that aircraft were never over the forest at the same time. This was fantastic practice at managing multi-aircraft flight operations and managing airspace.

Ultimately, the mission was more successful and the entire forest was imaged. However, due to an elevation differential between actual ground level and the tops of trees, the center of the forest did not successfully rectify in processing. This is because the drone assumes it is imaging features at ground level. However, the tree canopy is much closer to the aircraft. This means that the drone is collecting images assuming ground level overlap, but is actually collecting much lower overlap. The solution would be to either fly much higher or increase overlap significantly. Overlap is quite high in this mission, but perhaps the small amounts of increase may not be enough. Flying higher is not possible without written permission by the FAA, so in the short term that may not be possible. Thus, additional solutions are being considered such as different geospatial position methods such as PPK.