Kyle Sheehan's Flight Deck

This week's post highlights some of the comparisons between two applications that we are using Drone Logbook and Measure. Both of these apps are used as a ground control station link between your phone/tablet and the aircraft you are flying. In this post, I hope to highlight some of the key features of each app, and at the end I will offer some insight into my team's opinion on the apps. We begin by comparing the startup pages. First, the measure app has a clean startup screen where you are given four simple options: "airspace map" where you can view surrounding airspace and where you are legal to fly, "settings" where you can adjust in-app settings, "fly" which takes you to the flight deck allowing you to see through the lens of the UAV (if applicable) and view real-time flight data, and "flight plan" where you are able to draw out the polygon that you are wanting to fly and adjust the overlap, speed, etc. This startup screen is a v...

Every year, the School of Aviation and Transportation Technology holds a poster symposium which features student-led projects from the idea. As a capstone class, we aim to submit ~3-4 posters to this symposium to demonstrate some of the things that we have been working on in this capstone project. We want to demonstrate to people that UAS is much more than a "push button and fly" operation. We want to display the importance of things such as crew resource management, flight operations and implemented training, GPS, and applying geospatial data. So as a class, we brainstormed that those were the topics that we most wanted to cover. From there, we divided up into teams of two, the team names and focus areas are listed below: Team 1: Kyle and Thomas - operation management (structure of class) Team 2: Ian and Todd - Flight operation Training Team 3: Dylan and Ryan - GPS Team 4: Evan and Krysta - Applied Geospatial Data However, there may be some alterations to be ...

This week, we put our mission planning to the test with a simulated "dry-run" or run through of a mission. The mission that we chose this week was a flood event of the Wabash river. As the operations manager, I created a simulated scenario to give to the class. I told them "The Wabash river experienced flooding due to the intense rain fall overnight, and we need to find the extent of the flooding." I did not share with them how we were going to capture the data.  The walk-through was very productive, as we tossed around multiple ideas on what we need to capture, how we were going to capture it, etc. With Dr. Hupy guiding us, we established that we did not need to capture a specific flooding event, rather we could use the A800 high resolution camera to capture imagery of our entire area. This payload will allow us to create a detailed model of the area, including any elevation change. From there we can throw the data into one of our many softwares and simulate a ...