Quadcopters -non avian flying things for a change!

I have submitted an application for funds to buy one of these Phantom quadcopters for White Stork research (fingers crossed), so I jumped at the chance to do a short course: Aerial Photography for Fieldwork using UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). 

Also, it looked too much like pure good fun!

Meet the Phantom Quadcopter. With its glowing lights it is sometimes mistaken for an alien spacecraft!
Red is the front, green is the back -not so easy to see when it is a distant speck in the sky above you.

In the last few years quadcopters have suddenly become easy enough to fly and cheap enough to be in the range of even the more humble research budgets. Whilst mostly used by snowboarders and skateboarders to film stunts (and most of the aerial footage in Top Gear is filmed with UAVs), they can also be used to help answer a whole variety of research questions.

Fitting the GoPro camera

This particular quadcopter is mainly used to map changes in mountain sides and valley floors before and after volcanic eruptions or erosion events in Ecuador, the Caribbean and other amazing places. The images can be overlaid on to terrain or elevation models to create amazing 3D images of changes over time. 

The Sainsbury's Centre, from the pilots view... 

...and what the quadcopter saw.
Structures from Motion. One of many hundreds of images that we will stitch
together to make a 3D model of the Sainsbury's Centre.

Mission complete. Good catch!
UAVs were all developed by the military so it is full of
military termimology. A flight is called a Mission -of course!

Investing in a quadcopter is much cheaper than purchasing a satellite image -and they are far more versatile and reusable! 

Uses include:
-Vegetation mapping
-Monitoring changes over time, eg slopes prone to rockfall or mudslides; or to detect patches of illegal logging in rainforests. 

-The camera can easily be modified to thermal or near-infra red imaging to look for nesting birds, or assess plant health (by detecting chlorophyll levels). In this way farmers could target fertilize crops rather than treating whole fields. 

-Fire fighters have used UAVs in controlled experiments to to assess how fire takes hold as it burns across a field, and to look for thermal heat patches that may signal fires in a building before any smoke is detected. 

-Or it could simply be used to view high or dangerous to reach places, like me checking number of eggs in inaccessible stork nests. 

The number of possible applications of UAVs in research will only increase as technology improves. I'm sure it wont be long before university degree courses feature modules in piloting UAVs and the post-processing of image data.

Quadcopter cam view from ground level.....
Mission: to map the UEA Broad. Lift off imminent with me at the controls.
Karen holds a GPS to log various control points round the broad.
After we have cropped and merged together a selection of images
into one photo this can then be geo-referenced and digitalised by
overlaying it on to a map layer in mapping software packages, such as GIS.

...and the Quadcopter's view of the UEA Broad.
You can just see a blue spec holding the white box -thats me
at the controls.

The Phantom flies in winds of over 30mph
and flies itself to some extent. It was amazing
to see it leaning against the wind to maintain
position as it hovered.