Figure 1:
C-Astral Bramor PPX; Picture curtesy of DroneProvide.com
Introduction:
This blog will document my experiences and work during
my Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) capstone at Purdue university. I plan on
merging this blog with my previous blogs on the rest of my aviation courses
here at Purdue.
Our first meeting for this capstone course set out a
general overview for the course, including a syllabus, course goals, and flight
demos; which I will outline below. Before I move on however, I want to
establish that, at the time of writing this, the COVID-19 virus is still very
active in the United States and while Purdue University and our class
specifically are taking great measures to prevent the spread of the virus there
is a distinct possibility that further outbreaks beyond our control may cause
our course of action for this class to change dramatically or be postponed
altogether.
Overview:
Once we assembled at our work area within the Purdue
wildlife area, class started in the way that most classes do with an overview
of the course syllabus, now I could pad this out by summarizing the content of
all 11 pages of the syllabus but that would be boring, stupid, and take
forever. So instead the highlights of the course include: due to the virus
situation we don’t really have a lecture component to this class. Instead, we
will be working in flight crews of 3 in order to complete various applied UAS
data collection projects; using a variety of UAS platforms and sensors (Such as
the C-Astral Bramor pictured above). Most of these projects will involve the
use of UAS platforms and Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) to affect Search
and Rescue (SAR) operations and forestry surveying.
After the syllabus was covered, we moved on to demoing
the platforms we would be using this semester. We began by watching our TA’s go
through the process of setting up and launching the Bramor. The Barmor is a
fixed-wing, sled-launched UAV. I’m sure I will cover the details of the actual
setup and operation of the Bramor in a future post, but the focus of the demo
was to observe and note the practices that we will be enforcing during the
semester. This included noting the importance of checklists, crew-management,
effective communication, safety precautions, and environmental factors. All of
which I will cover in greater detail at a later date; yes, I know I’ve been
saying that a lot in this report, it was the first day be patient.
The next demo was a bit more hands on as we
familiarized ourselves with the operation of our quadcopter platform, who’s
name escapes me at the moment but I will edit in at a later date… As a
quadcopter all of our members are familiar with the flight handling
characteristics of this sort of platform so the purpose of this demo was to
take advantage of the platform’s sensor package and multicrew capability to
familiarize ourselves with operating the visual and thermal imaging cameras and
operating as a multicrew team. In my demo one of my TA’s piloted the drone
while I used the thermal and high magnification cameras the drone was equipped
with to locate and identify another TA that was wondering around the wildlife
area. That pretty much wrapped up our first day.
Conclusions:
This semester is going to present us with a host of
unique challenges as we try to adapt to the changing situation with the
COVID-19 pandemic. However, the applied research that we will be doing in this
lab will establish a basis of professionalism and best practices that will be
invaluable not only as we individually move on into the workforce but also be
crucially influential in the future as UAS becomes more and more common and
organizations try to integrate and expand UAS into the airspace and workforce.
