Portfolio Spring 2023
GIS in the Real World
Being able to integrate UAS data into a Geographic Information System software
package for analysis and utilization is considered one of the most sought-after skills in the field of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. I will be demonstrating how I was able to accomplish this task using data personally collected from the Purdue Wildlife Area in West Lafayette, Indiana. To achieve this I broke down the final goal into three subsections: collection, processing, and data outputs.
Mission planning is one of the most crucial steps to a successful UAS mission. Our mission location was set for the Purdue Wildlife Area (PWA), a research area just a few miles away from Purdue’s main campus. Here is a pinned map for reference (Purdue Wildlife Area). We determined that to successfully complete our mission task we would use the following hardware: Mavic 2 Pro drone, Pix4d Mobile App, and AeroPoint GCPs. Upon arrival, we walked around placing our AeroPoints making sure to do so in a way that they covered the entire area and were distributed equally. As we did this we used the ArcGIS Field Maps app to collect/store the location of these aeropoints which we used later on to compare how far off the collected data was from the actual aeropoint. Here is the collected AeroPoint data on ArcGIS Online (AeroPoints). You can see all of the collected points and if you click on each point you will see a picture I took in the field as well as some notes on each point. The weather on our mission day was nice with partly cloudy skies, a temperature around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and a wind speed of 10 miles per hour from the south. Here are some attached images of the weather reports and images from the mission site. (Weather). We ran the mission at an altitude of 110m to stay below another group flying at 120m and had our front / lateral overlaps set both to 80. The mission was completed with no problems on 4/19/2023 with a total flight time of thirteen minutes starting at 11:08 am. Our metadata is attached for more information regarding the mission. (MetaData).
Processing data is the next most important part of a UAS mission. We processed our data using the Pix4D computer software and then took the given outputs to create a series of maps within ArcPro. Our images were first uploaded and processed to Pix4D and our output coordinate system was set to NAD83(2011) / UTM zone 16N. Next, we marked and matched the GCPs in Pix4d to ensure that we would be able to get accurate position data. (Quality Report).
My next output is a map that compares our orthomosaic image to our processed DSM which has had a hillshade added onto it for more clarity of the elevation data in the picture. Unfortunately, our elevation data suffered from an unknown error causing it to be inaccurate. This is most likely due to a human error when using the AeroPoints.
Our final goal with our outputs was to create a map showing all grass-covered areas that are more than 20 meters away from roads and trees taller than 10 meters. We did this in a few different steps which I will show below including classifying areas and creating buffers so we can complete the task at hand as accurately as possible.
