I have to say that I love testing new scientific toys. My latest acquisition is a set of Propeller Aeropoints. This is a set of ten foam targets with embedded GNSS that we place out in an area of interest before conducting a drone mapping mission. Why? Although my drones have onboard GNSS units, they are not always very accurate. This can make it difficult to know the exact location of a feature, and particularly challenging when trying to line up images to investigate changes over time. The aeropoints log their X,Y,Z location, and this can be used to correctly align a drone image mosaic.

Each Aeropoint is 0.5 x 0.5 m in size and despite being foam, it is a little heavier than expected, especially when impersonating a packhorse (does this make it ‘imanimalating’?) and carrying all ten. However, the weight is important as well so that they don’t blow away. Which they certainly don’t. Their low profile also ensures that they don’t move once set in place. Unless maybe in major winds, but in that case I wouldn’t be flying anyway. As for the size – well they need to be clearly visible in the imagery so they couldn’t be too much smaller either.

Pretty much all you need to do is spread out the targets around the survey area, turning them on as you go. They need to log for at least 45 minutes to get a good position fix, so it’s important to do this before having a cup of tea and setting up the drone. Simply fly the mission when ready, and collect the targets when done! As you collect each one, it will attempt to upload its data via your mobile device. If you’re not within internet range it will continue to try to connect until it’s successful. It can then take supposedly up to 24hrs to process the location data, but in the trials I have run, they were completed and available almost immediately.

Perhaps my favourite design feature about the Aeropoints is that they are solar powered. It’s a thumbs up for the environment and just one less set of batteries that I need to charge – I have enough of that to do with all of my drone equipment and other field sensors! So this is a really nice touch.

All in all, I'm pretty impressed with the Aeropoints and their ease of use. Given that my favourite field locations are out on the Great Barrier Reef, they will have limited immediate use for me as the correction network doesn't cover my sites, and of course the GNSS doesn't work underwater. Wouldn't that be awesome if it did!

Thanks to Tom Watson from Droner for collecting the data to support this.

As with many fabulous pieces of advice, it’s not rocket science. BUT it takes considerable skill to bring these little pearls of wisdom from the periphery of our consciousness to front and center in our mind. And that’s something that Alicia Amerson has done particularly well in her latest book ‘Six-word lessons for Drone Pilots and Outdoor Enthusiasts: 100 Lessons to Make Drone Flights Safe, Ethical, and Green for Wildlife and Humans’.

This book is part of the ‘Six-Word Lessons’ series of books. I confess to not knowing anything about this style prior to reading her book, but it certainly makes for easy reading – even in a single sitting. The book is divided into chapters that are all named with six words. Each of her 100 lessons is also entitled with six words, followed by a short paragraph description.

The crux of the book is that we all have a shared responsibility to care for our environment and those that live in it. She explores this through understanding the positive and negative impacts that drones and their operations can have, with a particular flavor of wildlife protection. Alicia’s research and experience as a marine biologist and drone pilot make her an authoritative source on the potential impacts our behavior causes, and ways in which to mitigate those impacts.

One thing that has stood out in my mind is that while you may not perceive an animal’s behavior to change, that doesn’t mean that a drone hasn’t distressed it. The example she gives is of a bear whose heart rate increased 400% in response to a nearby drone, despite showing no other visible signs of stress. She also points out that it is not only the drone noise, but the shadow and silhouette that need to be considered.

Now I work a lot on coral reefs and I have heard others say ‘don’t worry about the drone, boats are far more disruptive’. And they may well be, but I also don’t believe that we should say ‘don’t worry about cigarettes, ice is way worse’. I think that we should worry about both. And that’s not to say that drones shouldn’t be flown, but just that we should take care to do so respectfully. The power is in our hands to reduce our impacts.

Alicia’s book is filled with common sense reminders, and little gems about animal behavior. I love her ideas for ‘greening your drone footprint’, and I’m super impressed by the wealth of knowledge she has managed to distil into such a simple format. I highly recommend this as required reading for anyone flying drones in our great outdoors. 

​After a week of balancing tides, cloud cover, water clarity, sun angle, wind, and swell, Notus the Greek God of the South Wind finally got the better of us. We can’t complain, having lost only 2.5 days out of a 10 day trip in the completely exposed northern Great Barrier Reef during cyclone season. I think we’ve been incredibly lucky. Nonetheless, I still feel like I am on the steep part of the learning curve when it comes to flying drones despite dabbling for the past couple of years. This current field trip brought new challenges, the most notable being having to launch and recover from the roof of our boat.

With technology changing so rapidly, I find myself flying with a different configuration of drone / sensor / flight controller / ground station software each trip. For this particular trip I had to put aside my larger drones due to the small area for take-off and landing. Previously I have opted for the 3DR Solo if I wanted to fly in the sub 2kg category, but with a rocking boat underfoot, I knew that Betty and Shmoo wouldn’t be happy. This instability didn’t seem to bother Casper, my DJI Phantom 4 Pro, which also has the added benefit of the landing gear shaped like handles for the optional ‘catch’ if required.
 
In all honesty, I didn’t want to resort to catching. Something about soft skin around spinning propellers doesn’t make me comfortable. I’ve seen the YouTube video where the Phantom is used as a very efficient blender. Granted I think the props may have been changed for carbon fibre rather than plastic, but still.

My alternative was to purchase the WaterStrider. Not that I intended to use this to land on the water, but I thought it would help out when landing on the boat’s unstable surface. I feel like the Phantom can tip quite easily on landing so I wanted to help it out. My first impressions of the Strider were that it was larger than I thought, and the floating pads looked GPS receivers. My second and final impression was that it is a good idea, but certainly poor execution.

For some time I've been fascinated by the marked temperature differences over short distances I can feel when swimming at the beach or on the reef. This clearly happens at scales that are far too small to be detected by satellite imaging sensors. As I'm also interested in coral reef dynamics, I am curious to know just how these fine scale variations may play a part in affecting coral health. Temperature loggers are one way to look at this, but they are always going to represent discrete points compared to an imaging sensor that can measure a continuous surface. An airborne thermal imaging sensor is therefore the only way that I can start to investigate this matter.

Recently, a couple of miniaturised thermal sensors have come onto the market and are light enough to be carried by off-the-shelf drones. I've been dabbling with drones for a couple of years now, so it seemed the right time to see where I could take this. Last week I had the opportunity to test the FLIR Vue Pro on Orpheus Island, Great Barrier Reef, and here's what I found.

Firstly, here's my equipment:

• 3DR Solo (see also my thoughts about my first Solo flight)
• FLIR Vue Pro 19 mm lens, 640 x 512 pixel array, 'slow' speed thanks to Tim Snell from IMC
• GoPro Hero 4 Silver modified with 4.35 mm minimal distortion
• Go Pro Dual Mount
• Rugged Troll Thermal loggers
• FLIR Vue Pro App (for android or iOS)
• USB power pack

Power supply
The first thing to note is that the FVP does not come with a power supply or battery, just a mini USB input cable. So obviously to use it, you need to have a way to power it. Mains power is clearly restrictive, but is fine for getting familiar with the camera. For a mobile option, I bought a USB power pack ($30). At 80 grams, this could be attached to the drone, but it's still a lot of unnecessary weight. Luckily the 3DR Solo has an accessory bay that's built for exactly this sort of thing. For the lighter option of 65g, a colleague made me a mini USB connector that also includes navigation lights for the Solo (it's severely lacking in this regard, and I plan to fly at night). We have some work to do in giving this some finesse especially as we weren't sure how long the USB cable needed, but at least we now have power to the camera.

Attachment / Mounting
How to mount the camera was the next main decision. It comes with a GoPro attachment ring / collar that fits under the lens. This is fine if you want to mount it on the Solo facing forward, but for mapping purposes it doesn't provide enough clearance from the hull. I opted instead to use a tripod-to-GoPro adaptor which then allowed the necessary clearance. Unfortunately when every gram counts I'd rather not have this added weight, but short of building a specific mount with not enough time, this will do the job.

Next I wanted to see if I could fly both the GoPro and the FVP at the same time. To do this, I bought a dual mount and fitted the GoPro to the front of the craft while the slightly heavier FVP was closer to the centre of gravity. Taking care to use the shortest GoPro connector screws possible, this complete set up (including lights) weighed 1.84kg, just 20g more than the standard gimbal + GoPro configuration. This is still within the expected MTOW of the craft. I can fly this set up in the hot and humid tropics for approximately 12 mins, while retaining at least 20% battery at the end of the flight.

Controlling the camera
With the hardware largely figured out, software was the next challenge. The FVP App is pretty basic to be honest, but it largely does the job. I was having some troubles with it initially, but an update came out last week that largely solved the issues. I learnt to just ignore its warnings.

Within the App, it's possible to change colour palettes, dynamic range, and output format (jpg or tiff). I use the white hot palette as I'm not concerned about the display, I just want the actual data in the pixels. I can always display it as different colours later if I wish. The app is used to switch between video, image, or time lapse modes. Images can be set to acquire as frequently as 1/sec up to 1/17 secs. Data are written to the 32GB included mini sd card in the camera.

The biggest miss on the app is that there is no live feed of the imagery. This is a real pain when trying to work through the different settings - without the immediate feedback of the effect of a setting change, it's like learning old school photography again and having to wait until your film is developed before you can see the results. There is the facility for a mavlink cable (provided), so a feed should be possible via the drone itself though I didn't test this out as its not a simple plug in.

The App uses bluetooth to connect to the FVP. Once you have the recording started, you can manually switch the blue tooth off. Alternatively, I do like how the Bluetooth automatically disables itself after two minutes of the App being closed so that it cannot otherwise interfere with the flight controller. Yet even with the App closed, the FVP continues to record data and you can see this by a small flashing light on the camera itself.

if you're intending on using Tower or Mission Planner to set up your flights, it's useful to add the FVP camera specs into the software so that footprints and overlaps can be accurately determined. To do this have a look at these instructions, but use the following parameters (note that you will have to change this if you have the smaller format frame):
<Camera>
<name>FLIR Vue Pro 19mm</name>
<flen>19</flen>
<imgh>512</imgh>
<imgw>640</imgw>
<senh>8.7</senh>
<senw>10.88</senw>
</Camera> 

Working with the data
Downloading the data is super easy. Simply get a mini SD card adapter and plug it into your computer. My files were all 643KB ea. But that's when things got a little more challenging. I wanted to geotag each image based on the Solo telemetry data. This is usually pretty simple in Mission Planner - at least for my GoPro data. But MP couldn't match the image acquisition times with the GPS data. I suspect it is something to do with the format, as the time stamp on each of the TIFFs looked fine to me. I had to assume that it was auto-syncing with the tablet that I used to control it as I couldn't find a way to otherwise change it. I then tried again to geotag with Geosetter, and that worked so clearly there's nothing wrong with the files, but something wrong with Mission Planner reading their metadata. I also realised that each image actually HAD a geotag initially, but that it was set at 0,0 lat/long. That totally messed up our attempt to mosaic in Photoscan without fixing that first.

Given that the imagery I acquired is not the standard type that Pix4D or Photoscan can easily mosaic (i.e. it's hard to automatically find control points over water) we are certainly having some challenges there. Once I've sorted it all out, I'll post a blog specifically on that.

In the meantime, I am happy that the camera is sensitive to what I need. Early views of the data are really promising!

Calibrating for absolute temperatures
The top of the range FVP is radiometrically calibrated. The one that I received was radiometrically capable but not yet calibrated. Quite a bit cheaper... For many applications, relative temperatures may be just fine, but I wanted absolute. And as I have a fully calibrated FLIR A65, and access to temperature loggers, I performed my own calibration. I used a couple of Chinese takeaway containers filled with iced water, boiling water, and something in between, all inside a black box tucked inside a storage cupboard - somewhat similar to Harry Potter's bedroom - with the lights out. The FLIR sensors are sensitive to reflected light in the 8-14um range as well, so I wanted to get rid of that and only have the emitted temperatures. I used FLIR Tools for the A65 (below) and took photos of the same area with the FVP using the App. I still have to model the correction - another post again!

Studying is tough, I get that. I've been there, and I don't envy you! I felt nervous as I watched you walk into the exam room - I'm sure you felt much worse though. But you'll be relieved after two hours - it's then that my pain begins!

I receive your exams with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Your assessment items are the ultimate feedback on my performance. I look at what you write, and I take it personally. Did I neglect to teach you something, or could I have explained a concept better?  I share your wish to succeed.

So let's work together. Here's some things that you can do for me:

• If you really don't know an answer, please don't make me read through waffle. Spend your time enhancing the answers you actually have something to say about;
• Read (and answer!) all parts of the question - highlighters are great for helping with this;
• Address the question - it doesn't matter how good your answer is if it doesn't meet the brief;
• When I offer you the opportunity to discuss your work before it's due, please take me up on this;
• Different coloured pens are a great asset;
• Figures, diagrams, tables are a fabulous way of not having to write heaps of text (and I thank you for this simplicity;
• There is absolutely no need to repeat the question in your answer - just tell me the answer and how you got there;
• Please don't write in pencil;
• Keep white space in your writing - i.e. leave a spare line between questions and paragraphs;
• If the question says that dot points are fine, please use them;
• If you already know that your handwriting is hard to read, at least try to make it bigger;
• Quality, not quantity! From the good Dr Suess: 'The writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads'; an
• Far better to do something simple, and do it well, than to attempt to save the world and accomplish nothing.

Good luck with your assessments!

I spent last week in New Zealand with Aeronavics as the builder of my new UAS. It's been a tough project officially only running this year, but in reality it's been part of my world in some way for the past fifteen! To see it come to fruition has been pretty special.

I first contacted Aeronavics around two years ago. As a fledgling company they were doing some really cool things with drones. I always enjoyed talking to Linda (company director) as she was enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and focused on providing the right solution for me - not just in giving a hard sell. At the time I had minimal funding but she never made me feel like I was wasting her time. 

When I secured an Australian Research Council grant in November last year, I was able to think seriously about building the craft I had been considering for years. I was excited when Aeronavics won the tender to work with me on it. I knew that they had the right customer service focus to make this truly amazing.

Aeronavics operate out of a farmhouse in Raglan, New Zealand. Their set up is unique and adds to the feeling of being welcomed into their family, in their home. But this is not just a backyard operation. It is an incredibly professional setup with at least a dozen staff busily working - several of whom were solely focussed on delivering us perfection.

The week in Raglan was not without incident. This is a highly customised machine, and there were so many tweaks required. I didn't realise the level to which they were designing every little aspect just for me! On Thursday it seemed that nothing was going to go our way. One small modification meant cascading effects elsewhere. We had some battery problems that resulted in a minor crash, snapping the landing gear. The craft was dropping altitude in forward motion and seemingly having troubles with the barometer. The enclosed computers were over heating. I began to wonder if I'd be bringing it home. But in all honesty, I was pleased to see the problems arising over there, rather than when I took ownership of it! 

Yet the staff made it clear that they would not rest until they had engineered a solution for every problem. They worked until midnight and were back again in the early hours. Impressively, senior staff stayed behind to support the engineers and technicians, even if only moral support was possible. The directors brought dinners in. The colleague I brought with me pitched in where he could. I felt useless, but stayed anyway - it just wouldn't have felt right to leave! There were no complaints, no grumbles, just plenty of good humour.

On Friday morning somehow it all managed to come together. The pixhawk was swapped and the altitude drop ceased. They installed new lights and they looked awesome. It flew beautifully. It was still without a hard hat, as the large 'brain size' with all the computing power for my sensors meant they need to get a custom top 3d printed. But in the meantime, Dominique the local wedding dress designer created and fitted a soft cap. One of her more unusual assignments!

After our final test flights confirmed everything in working order, it was all hands on deck to pack it down, get our paperwork finalised, and get us out the door in time for our flight. What had been a busy but relatively relaxed week became suddenly stressful! We made it in the end on time and without excess baggage charges, which felt like a major achievement!

Before I left for NZ, I had naively thought the week would be straightforward and simple. What I had forgotten - and not for the first time in this project - was that pushing boundaries and ease are mutually exclusive.  I wanted a machine capable of carrying a unique payload of complex sensors. If I wanted simplicity, I should have gone to Harvey Norman and bought a Solo with Go Pro.

Having said that, Aeronavics largely took the pain out of the hard work. It has been a pleasure to worth with them and I appreciate the efforts of the team even more after I was immersed in it for the week. It's been fun, but now the hard work for me really starts in integrating my sensors and turning data into information. Oh, and in retrieving the UAS from customs in Brisbane after they seized it on my way back into the country...

Last week I spent an entire day trying to sort out my Iris+ with Tarot gimbal / Go Pro setup. Yes, it's supposed to be plug and play. And it sort of was. Just not play properly. The issue I had was widely noted on the net: the camera / gimbal 'shuddered' and would not hold a position. Generally I could get it pointed straight down, or straight out, but nothing in between. And then in flight, it would randomly switch between down or out angle - perhaps it thought it could choose the camera angle better than I could! Indeed, there were some nice horizon shots!

​
​So back in the lab, I went back to the beginning to install and configure the gimbal. The reason I wasted so much time was because some of the websites that I visited had incorrect advice. Imagine that!

Rather than write an entire user guide, I've collated what I found out to work for me:

How to install the Tarot gimbal:
This is the best site to use. There are several, many with incorrect advice (including the 3dr official site!).

Make sure that you get the gimbal connection right! The connection shown here in step 3 is INCORRECT. The black wire needs to go to the pin on the bottom right of the picture, not the middle one. Thanks 3DR, this was one of my biggest problems - in this configuration the gimbal would not respond to the RC after the firmware upgrade at all. Weird that it responded beforehand though...

If the gimbal shudders (mine did!), upgrade the gimbal firmware as per above best site. Note the importance of NOT connecting to the power source until AFTER you start the upgrade. Weird hey. It's shown perfectly in the video below.

When trying to configure the gimbal, if you get a prolific USB to serial error, follow the directions on this page. I tried links from other pages as well but they didn't work. This was definitely the best one.

Once you've done all this, if the camera is not pointing in the correct direction, you need to re-calibrate it. Point it straight upwards towards the belly of the platform. Click on 'calibrate sensor'. This is shown in the video below as well.

If I had used the ardupilot wiki in the first place, then I would have saved myself a lot of time! For those sifting through the sea of advice on this matter, hopefully this confirms for you which recommendations to follow.

This morning I headed out to do a test flight with the 3DR Solo. I have to say - I was suitably impressed!

We flew with a GoPro in fixed position, rather than using a gimbal, so I can't comment about gimbal stability. But I liked the way the camera could be easily moved from looking outwards to downwards (pre-flight), while still feeling like it would hold its position during flight.

Some of the features that I particularly liked were:

• The box it comes in! Nice and sturdy, one of those ones that you don't want to throw out. Which is great, because it will do the job for transportation until you figure out which Pelican case or similar you need in the longer term
• The batteries. OK, propriety is a bit of a pain, and they are rather expensive, but their charge is easy to check with some lights on top, and they click in so smoothly to the upper body of the platform
• The centre-default throttle, which is great for holding altitude
• The integrated tablet holder, so you can use the Tower app at the same time as flying (annoying the app is not for iOS though)
• Flat propeller profile - makes them easy to pack away
• As with the Iris+, the idiot proof set up with the propellers having matching colours and icons to show which way to turn them to tighten - even my 4 year old can set this up without instruction
• The information screen is really easy to read and informative! Even with polarising sunnies on, it was super clear to see
• The option to add different payloads is a huge plus. We're looking to integrate a spectrometer, so I'm definitely keen to put this to the test
• Changing between manual and automatic flight is very easy with the Tower app. I definitely recommend two operators though. 'Unmanned' airborne vehicle is a bit of a misnomer!

There are only a couple of minor things where there is room for improvement in my opinion:

• Would like to see the front and back of the platform in different colours like the Iris+. The lights can't be seen during the day, so it's impossible to tell which way it's facing. Having said that, coloured or not, it's nearly impossible after it gets a little further away anyway, so I guess this isn't big issue.
• I felt a little limited with the flight modes. I'm used to being able to flick a switch to change between loiter and alt hold, then RTL for example. That could be done from the tablet but I don't want to take my eyes off the aircraft and controller to switch. Might just take some more experimenting.

With the fixed Go Pro, I flew for approximately 16 mins on a single battery, landing at the recommended 20% charge. There was a light breeze and I wasn't really working it hard, so I expect that this is the upper limit of flight time.

Two years ago I bought a dJI s800 for a complete package of around $10K. It came in a dodgy half broken cardboard box with no balance charger or power supply. Yet it was considered 'ready to fly'. The batteries allowed for five minutes of flight time before four hours of charging. Flight planning was difficult, and it was near impossible to extract the telemetry details post flight. The technology has come a long way since then!

The 3DR Solo is certainly 'off the shelf' technology that can be purchased from Harvey Norman or similar. It set my colleague back about $2K for the platform, spare battery, android tablet, and Go Pro. Certainly a worthwhile investment for extending field survey range, and scaling up to satellite data.

There are a heap of other features that I didn't check out in this preliminary test. But it certainly exceeded expectations in the areas I considered. They have clearly done a lot of work in making the design as polished as possible, and it has paid off with user experience. This really can be used by a complete novice. CASA has an interesting challenge ahead to deal with regulation against increasing accessibility of these devices.

My husband is heavily involved in the sporting industry. While he works across a range of different areas, one of the things that he especially enjoys is mentoring coaches. He was telling me recently about the difference between an athlete learning technical vs. tactical skills on the sports field, and I realised that the importance of this is no different for students in my classroom.

Describing the difference between tactical and technical is easy using a sporting analogy. As a kid, I learnt judo. I suppose that I was technically rather good - I rapidly progressed to the capped level of brown belt (under 11's) and I still remember having to perform 16 throws and five hold-downs to achieve this. But put me on the dojo for a competition and I didn't win a single fight. Why? Because I hadn't been taught tactically about how to deal with different situations and different opponents. I had no ability to translate my technique into fight winning tactics.

The relevance for tertiary education? How often do we ask students to regurgitate information in the same way that I rote learned my 16 throws? Will that arm them with the skills to perform in the workplace? In my analogy example - not necessarily. That's not to say that there is no place for technical learning. I certainly needed to learn the variety of throws, but what I missed was a deep understanding of how they could be applied. This would have made me more adaptable to any situation that was presented.

As the penny dropped on this particular example for me, it reminded me just how important it is to teach using problem based learning (tactical) approaches. In my classes, I tend to offer the technical learning as 'flipped' tasks, while my in-class activities are designed to foster more tactical learning (see 'My recipe to flip, not flop' and 'How to make sure your class isn't a flipping hell'). By presenting students with a range of different scenarios, I hope that I am helping to develop their skills and confidence in tactical problem solving. Hopefully they will be ready to face the reality of the workplace - or the 'fight'.

I love teamwork, especially sports. But to be honest, whenever I’m at a workshop and the facilitator asks the participants to get in a group, my inner self groans. Yet I don’t let this stop me from setting group tasks for my students! Why? Because I know that we learn better in social situations. And I know that the strong students will learn more from explaining things to the weaker students. And I know that the output of the whole should be greater than the sum of the parts. But clearly these things aren’t enough to create the enjoyable learning experience that’s intended.

So I know why it's good to work in a group, and these same benefits apply to teams. But what’s the difference?

While out cycling the other day (when I do my best thinking) I had a bit of a light bulb moment. It comes down to the cliché – there’s no I in team. Ok, so it may appear there’s not one in group either, but I’d like to propose that it’s an insidious invisible I.

A team has a common purpose or cause that they all buy into, and this creates cohesion. Team members join together to reach a goal that they chose. Conversely, I think that a group is still just a bunch of individuals. A group may have one or more of the following critical differences:

-          Purpose or goal is not identified;
-          Members didn’t choose the purpose or goal;
-          Members don’t believe in the purpose or goal

The other thing that I think benefits teamwork is the appeal to competitive natures. When we are competitive, we are striving to achieve our best. When we are at our best, naturally it’s more enjoyable.

But what’s the ‘so what factor’ for me? I want to optimise the level of learning and enjoyment that my students or workshop participants experience. Subconsciously I think that I incorporate many of the good aspects of ‘team’ in the activities I set. But I can certainly do more. And I'm going to remember these points and test out my theory next time I create a team activity.