First Nice Day to Fly--3/7/2016

With abnormally high temperatures for early March Dr. Hupy decided to take advantage and head out in to the field. Mike Bomber and Dr. Hupy made a number of upgrades to multiple platforms over the winter which require calibration and testing.

Dr. Hupy decided to meet at South Middle School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin around 11:00 am. South Middle School is where the majority of our flights take place due to the accessibility, location, and various features to capture with the imagery. Dr. Joseph Hupy, Mike Bomber, David Leifer, Mattheus de Waard, and myself made up the group for the day.

The first objective for the day was to calibrate the Hexacopter (Hexa).  Last year, the Hexa had a broken wire causing malfunction with the flight controller resulting in a crash. Multiple upgrades have been made to the Hexa since the crash, including a new GPS, and a upgraded flight controller. The GPS needs to be calibrated before any flights can be made.  The calibration of the GPS involves the technician to complete multiple circles while holding and rotating the platform on all axis.

The second objective for the day was to fly the Phantom which was also recently upgrade by the factory.  We experimented with multiple mission planning software programs including:

• Maps Made Easy (IPhone)
• Capture (Pix4D-Android Tablet)
• DJI Go (Android Phone)

I application platforms in the ( ) are what we used for our process. Some of the apps are available on both Apple and Android.

All of the apps worked very well and were user friendly. We flew the an area over the running track at South Middle School in Eau Claire, WI.

(Picture 1) Dr. J. Hupy (left) and Mr. Bomber (right) preparing the their respective platforms for flight. 

Results

Discussion

Looking at the mosaic image you can see some distortion with the lines on the track.  We did not tinker with various altitudes or spacing for these flights.  Checking the functionality of the various programs was the main objective. I feel these flights were successful and warrant further testing of these programs in the future.