Public Lab Research note


iFarm UAV Field Day

by cfastie | May 19, 2014 18:00 19 May 18:00 | #10481 | #10481

Above: Matt Koestner of UAV America unfolding the DJI S1000 (Photo: Ned Horning).

Each year iFarm adds an extra day. This year, Matt Wallhead organized Friday's all day UAV Field Day at Kingman Farm in Madbury, New Hampshire to kick off the three day weekend. Several multirotor and fixed wing aircraft were displayed and worked on, and two multirotors were flown over an apple orchard with various cameras to demonstrate their photography capability.

Michael Palace, an Assistant Research Professor in the Earth System Research Center at the Institute of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire, made several flights with his quadcopter (model?) carrying a GoPro, a TetraCam ADC Lite, or an Infragram Mobius ActionCam. The Tetracam is a $3000+ CMOS camera that works like a red filtered Infragram camera. It uses a yellow filter to capture a near infrared band in the blue channel and more or less normal red and green bands. Proprietary software adjusts the brightness values in the red and blue (NIR) channels based on assumptions about the proportion of the captured light in those bands that is infrared. There have been some discussions in the Public Lab community about doing this, and it seems like something that should be pursued.

Matt Koestner of UAV America, a high end UAV supplier in Lee, New Hampshire, flew a DJI S1000 octocopter. This large UAV is designed for professional photography and cinematography (the landing gear retract out of the way of the camera) and can carry a large DSLR. It costs between $5k and $8k. The DJI S1000 took a few flights with at least three different cameras.

My Infragram Mobius ActionCam flew on both UAVs, but the focus was not set correctly. I fixed that for a flight later in the weekend, so stay tuned.

Below is some video I shot from the ground of the two UAVs at Kingman Farm. The first scenes are Michael Palace and then Matt Koestner. Lots of other video and photos were taken from the ground and air, so I hope we get to see some of those too.


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