Lucas WR UAS

GIS Day Poster Last week we presented our GIS poster rough draft to the class to receive critiques and make necessary changes before GIS day on November 7th, 2019. Below are the critiques we received from the class and Dr. Hupy, we took into consideration all critiques and made changes we thought were necessary. Our final poster is pictured below, click on the image to view the full-size figure.

GIS Day Abstract We continue to prepare ourselves for Purdue GIS day, we have created a rough draft of our poster to be presented and developed an abstract that summarizes our project very well. This poster and abstract need to get the viewers attention very quick and be able to showcase the focus of our research effectively. Our abstract is a quick overview for viewers to give them a good idea of who we, what we are doing and how we will be achieving it. Our main focus is to implement UAS effectively into search and rescue operations, we do this through the Loc8 software. A quick overview of how this is done and an introduction to the software allow viewers to quickly and effectively know the scope of our work. A copy of our abstract can be found  here. GIS Day Poster Figures To showcase our findings it is important for us to visually compare the time it takes for us to complete a mission with UAS and the time it takes to complete a mission using traditional methods. For our po

As GIS day approaches faster and faster, November 7th to be exact, we continue to make progress on the poster we will present. GIS day is a great opportunity for us to present our capstone research involving Search & Rescue missions utilizing UAV data, and an innovative software called Loc8. Our poster has made great strides since we created our template a few weeks ago. Now, we have nearly-complete sections covering the overview of our project and group, our objectives, data collecting and testing methodology, results, discussion, future direction, and more. We are very proud of the continued progress we have made on our poster, and will continue to improve upon it until the conference. We have continued to collect data throughout the period of working on our poster, and have been running tests and experiments with our software as well. Our continued findings, and learnings, have helped us add a lot of depth to our poster. As we get nearer to GIS day, we will continue to add and i

Now that we have entered the advanced stages of our senior design capstone project, we are full swing on data collection and experiment implementation. Over the previous 7 weeks our focus was determining the direction we want to take this project and designing experiments and various scenarios to test the Loc8 program. It is our goal to determine and prove that Loc8 is a faster method of locating a lost person or item in a search and rescue type scenario then traditional methods. During our preliminary research and testing we had difficulties demonstrating the usefulness and speed of this program as it appeared using the more traditional "squinting" method of looking for an item in a photograph was faster. However, as we worked with Loc8 more and received proper training, we began to get a sense for how we needed to use the program to gain its greatest efficiency. The goal this week was to run the experiments we had designed to officially determine whether or not Loc8  is

. This week in class we were tasked with creating a poster for the Fall 2019 UAS capstone class. The goal of the poster was to bring the entire class together as a team to create a product that represents what UAS as a major can offer students. I participated in this project in a variety of ways. As a student in the class I helped with suggestions about poster topic ideas along with the formatting of the poster and the introduction. I also came up with the idea and orchestrated the "fleet photo" that is featured in the center of the poster. After multiple topics were considered for the poster we as a class decided to focus on why the program would be a good choice for a prospective student. There are multiple career routes that can be chosen at Purdue University's airport, and one of them is UAS which stands for Unmanned Aerial Systems. This degree path is focused on drones and applies to students who want to benefit their future with a focus on hardware of drones and

Processing Updates This week, we processed one of our Purdue Wildlife Area flights in Pix4D. The purpose of processing an orthomosaic of this flight is to compare the time it takes, and the product quality we can get from Pix4D to our Loc8 searches.  Pix4D took an incredibly long amount of time to process this flight. Pix4D recommends having an overlap of at least 75%, and a sidelap of 60% for general use cases of orthomosaics. We flew this specific mission with 70% overlap, and 70% sidelap. Slightly less than recommended for overlap, and significantly higher than recommended for sidelap. The DJI Mavic 2 that we used was actually unable to finish the entire flight in one battery, seeing that a mission with 70/70 requires many flight lines. In fact, 70/70 requires more than three times the number of waypoints as a 10/10 flight does. To get into our processing though, figure 1 and 2 below show the quality report given to us by Pix4D. Figure 1: Pix4D Quality Report generated from o