Kyle Sheehan's Flight Deck

Unmanned aerial systems are often referred to as "drones", and while to the recreational user they  may be just a drone, the complexity of the "system" reaches far beyond the aircraft itself. Attached in this post is a simple figure that I constructed to demonstrate the different parts of the system and how they work together to form a UAS. The figure was carefully constructed to imitate the shape of a human body, this is because similar to a human body, each part is integral to its operations. Starting at the beginning, the head, is where the unmanned aerial system is located. All of the body parts come together to create the UAS. Moving down from the top, the UAS consists of three integral parts, the ground station, the aircraft, and the pilot. Making up one of the arms of the figure is the ground station. The ground station is vital to the UAS because it provides real-time data from the aircraft to the pilot. Such examples of this data includes altitude, headin...

Since my beginning in UAS studies, I have had the opportunity to work for three different companies in three different industries. My first internship was for Weihe Engineers, a civil engineering company in Indianapolis, IN. During this internship, I used a custom built aircraft to map farmland for development, mines for stockpile evaluations, and parking lots to gather elevation and drainage data. The pictures were taken with a standard RGB camera, and then imported into Agisoft for photo stitching and 2D/3D model creation. My second internship was for Purdue University working at the Agricultural Center for Research and Education (ACRE). The goal of the summer was to fly missions that would gather growth data for both soybeans and corn. My partner and I began the summer flying an S1000 aircraft, equipped with a LiDAR sensor and an RGB camera, and using Mission Planner as the ground station. The aircraft was rather unstable, so my partner and i began conducting research on aircraf...