AT409 Week 1 Report

 

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.