We have long had Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) equipment to support geodetic imaging with Structure from Motion, which uses parallax between images from a moving camera to create a 3D model. Recent regulations required us to retire our existing fleet, but replacing it provided an opportunity for us to look into adding new sensor types. We have good news to share on that front. (If you attended the SCEC annual meeting, you may already have heard!)
Part of our Common Sensor Platform team evaluated the available options to find a set of flexible NDAA-compliant components that could handle the kinds of projects we support. When we surveyed the community for input on sensor types, it was clear that there was demand for several — with lidar atop that list. That meant finding a vehicle that could fly multiple types of sensors equally well. We found a great fit for immediate project support as well as new use cases we’re exploring.
We now have three Freefly Astro drones, one of which was already deployed in Antarctica this last field season. This sturdy drone integrates well with RTK GNSS positioning and can carry a wide variety of sensors. We have a Sony LR1 61 megapixel camera for each drone, which should give us even better Structure from Motion results than our previous fleet.
The first new sensor capability we’ve added is the Flux O1 lidar instrument — we have three of these, as well. The software integration with this system was notable, as you can explore your point cloud on a tablet in the field within several minutes of completing a flight.
The other new sensor we have on hand is a Sentera 6X Thermal Pro multispectral camera. This camera separately images red, green, near infrared, and red edge wavelengths, as well as longwave infrared.
We’ve begun training engineers on this new equipment and validating data workflows, but we’re ready for your project requests now. Contact uas@earthscope.org or start a support request to discuss your project ideas. Project support will include a licensed and insured field engineer to fly your survey.
We hope to have even more new capabilities to share in the future. We’re evaluating additional sensors, and in the longer term we’re even investigating whether we could use drones to assist with deploying and retrieving geophysical sensors in the field or to download data from active arrays.
In the meantime, bring us your projects so our new tools can get to work!