UAS Data Collection

Introduction
Unmanned Aerial Systems are just what they sound like, a flight vehicle that does not have a human on it controlling it. They are controlled from the ground via a tablet or computer system. They can be programmed before take-off to perform a "mission" using ground control points (GCP's) or they can be manually controlled from the ground.

Study Area
The study area was the community garden at South Middle School in Eau Claire, WI (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Southside Neighborhood Garden

Methods
A Dual Frequency Survey Grade GPS was used to gather soil data (Fig. 2). Three attributes were collected: pH, Temperature (in C), and Volumetric Water Content (%) using a TDR probe.

Figure 2. TheDual Frequeny Survey Grade
GPS used

On a later date, 15 GCP's were collected with the Dual Frequency Survey Grade GPS which would later enable the imagery to be synced to GPS data to turn it into a true map. Aerial imagery was collected using an Unmanned Aerial System called the DJ1 Phantom (Fig. 3). Weather is a very important factor when flying a UAS, and the wind was a steady 9 mph and there was no rain so the flight could be made without much struggle.There was trouble getting the RTK on the drone to start up, but that was solved by inserting an SD card. The mission was then conducted smoothly.

Figure 3. The UAS Phantom

Data was processed in Pix4D by Professor Hupy and then brought into ArcMap to be analyzed and to design the maps.

Results
Below is the imagery of the community garden captured by the UAS (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. Imagery from Unmanned Aerial System

In order to create maps using the data collected from the Survey GPS, the data needed to be normalized. This would have been done but access was denied due to an error with the file (Fig. 5). Therefore, there are no maps including the survey data.

Figure 5. Error in excel.

Discussion
The Unmanned Aerial System flew successfully and collected clear imagery for use in map making and tying down to a spatial existence. The combination of the ground-based data and aerial-based data makes geographic surveying that much more accurate and realistic.