Tim Pruss UAS Blog

After last semester’s research work, we are going to work toward writing either White Papers or Peer Reviewed Articles. To start off, we will be researching the basics of what exactly white papers are, why we would bother writing them, and what the differences are between them and peer reviewed papers. This blog post is intended to document my research and understanding of White Papers. What is a White Paper? Investopedia  has a very business minded view of white papers, defining them as: “An informational document, usually issued by a company or not-for-profit organization, to promote or highlight the features of a solution, product, or service. They say that they are written as sales or marketing documents that are meant to entice the potential customer into further investigating the product or service in question.” This definition may have some overlap in that we are trying to inform the audience with what we are doing but we will not be looking to sell a product so there will b

On Thursday, November 7th we participated in the Purdue GIS Day by submitting our poster to their poster contest. We didn't win the award but it was certainly interesting to see the different posters that other people submitted to the contest, although many of them were quite specialized in their field and were not very accommodating to the lay person. I know that Alan won one of the awards for his poster on the utilization of GIS in UAS mission planning which was pretty interesting. Other posters from our capstone class included an analysis of UAS sightings and registered UAS pilots, the use of 3D modeling software to supplement photogrammetric software when generating 3D models, and using the Loc8 software to assist in search and rescue operations. There were also presentations at GIS Day from several speakers. Alan did a quick talk about his GIS in mission planning topic. There was also a representative from Maxar Technologies which uses satellites to take pictures of the eart

After presenting the rough draft of our poster, it was critiqued by our classmates. We wrote down each critique that was given to us and deliberated over the changes that we would make to our poster. Below is a list of critiques that we were given as well as our response to those critiques. Our rough draft of the poster looked like this: Figure 1. Poster Rough Draft "Emphasize the data “results”, should be more like 60%-70% of the poster" We agree with this point and will work to emphasize the results section more by decreasing the size of the other sections and including insets from the main orthomosaics. We incorporated three different subjects at each location and grouped them together to quickly see differences in the thermal imagery at different points in the day. "Combine abstract and introduction into one section" We agreed that the introduction was redundant to the abstract, and was replaced. We also removed the satellite images of our

Our poster is segmented into six different modules: (1) the project introduction, where we share the goal of the project and how we conducted our studies; (2) research questions, where we dive more in-depth into the goals of our project; (3) methods, where we talk about the platform we utilize and the process by which we go about collecting data sets; (4) answering the question of 'What are Diurnal Heat Patterns?’, where we talk about the reasons and justifications for our specific study; (5) Results, where we will share and discuss the Diurnal heat observations taken at three different sites at different times; (6) the Conclusion, where we will share our concluding statements, including charts showing the average temperature of the ground and buildings at each time of day. Included throughout the poster are aesthetically supplementary photos taken while flying missions and gathering data.

On top of the progress we have made in data collection and processing, we have also written the abstract for our poster and applied to participate in Purdue GIS day on November 5th. The abstract was to be 250 words or less and encompass what our project is about. Abstract: The high-resolution data captured from a UAS, such as thermal imagery, can be utilized in a wide variety of applications. The flexibility of using UAS to capture thermal data allows for multiple sets of data to be captured in a relatively short period of time at an almost on-demand basis. To best display the abilities of thermal imagery, the temperature changes of an area throughout the day were captured with the thermal sensor. These temperature changes are called diurnal heat patterns. Current data collection methods for studying diurnal heat patterns include satellite and aerial photography. However, problems with these methods include cost, speed, timing, and resolution. To address these challenges, a DJI M60

This week we managed to collect another data set of diurnal heat patterns. However, we ran into several problems that bring to light a couple of the difficulties of working with UAS and thermal data. The first problem we encountered was that the planned location of data collection, the Tippecanoe County Amphitheater, would be displeased at the prospect of us bringing the m600 and collecting data throughout the day without first contacting them. We decided that to avoid possible confrontation, that we would relocate to the Davis Ferry location right up the river. We began our first flight from the red circled area and captured data in the red boxed area.  Davis Ferry The amphitheater location is still on the cards, we will just have to get their permission beforehand while also making sure that the date works for all group members involved, has winds below 18 mph all day, the sky is clear enough that there are discernible differences between data sets, and that nobody el