IEOS 2015

A good day and a good turn-out at the IEOS yesterday in NUIG hosted by the Ryan Institute. A lovely campus, my first time there.

Our group was presenting, "Sensor Pods and Sensor Fusion; Initial Results from an Aerial Survey". We had combined a Nikon D800 SLR with a Zeiss lens, a Tau 640 Thermal, a Agrosensor Multispectral and a HD video camera in a sensor pod and used it for a number of different study areas in a single flight. Here is a snapshot of one of my slides -FCC, thermal and RGB of Knowth, an impressive passage tomb in Meath. I had originally thought it was Newgrange, which would have been a great claim to make as considering how much time I usually spend waffling about accuracies that would mean this system was off by about +/- 1,200 meters..

No questions from the audience afterwards - does that mean

a) they were lost
b) i explained everything so well nothing further was needed...

Ignorance is bliss, I don't need to know.

An excellent keynote speech covering SAR too and tipped me off on a few good sources for an upcoming iCrag project.

Planting Trees with Drones

This sounds like a great idea to combat deforestation. 26 billion trees cut down each year and only 15 billion replanted? The drone can be tasked to drop seeds in areas where no trees are currently growing (possibly using satellite imagery to pinpoint these locations?) and each seed will be coated in a nutrient rich gel to encourage rapid growth.

A really clever, positive use of drones.

Hopefully birds wont catch on that these flying seed dispensers exist or we'll see similar scenes to this as UAVs cross our skies.

Sentinel 1a and 2a

ESA released two nice pics in their media section showing results from Sentinel 1a and Sentinel 2a for monitoring ship traffic on the Romanian portion of the Danube. You can blame any geometric distortions on sensor calibration issues or on my shoddy cut and paste....its up to the reader to decide.

S1a

S2a

Collision proof

Following on from the last post of interesting drone designs - this new, collision proof idea from flyability, 'Gimbal' looks interesting. The drone is housed on a gimbal allowing 3 degrees of freedom so the propeller always stays upright while the case protects it.

Videos provided at the link.