My, how far we’ve come!
Just about one year ago I was out flying my kite almost everyday to get coverage over our two study sites on the UMBC campus. Over this past week we have made a huge step forward, a systematic ‘test’ flight with the Mikrokopter Hexacopter over the Herbert Run forests.
Flying the large delta conyne kites (like the one shown here, image credit Into The Wind Kites http://www.intothewind.com/) was fun and got the camera in the air, but it was very hard to control both the altitude of the camera and its position over the forest. This meant it was very difficult to test flight plans, or even begin to get at understanding the best flight plan strategy for use with computer vision.
Over the past summer we worked with several students from the UMBC GES and MECHE departments and a visiting intern from Clark University (thanks Evan, Nisarg, Garrett, and Noam) with the goal of using hobbyist aircraft to carry the cameras. We moved away from using the Canon CHDK camera setup, instead using high-speed (~2 photos / sec) cameras with continuous shooting modes to collect huge numbers of overlapping photos. We had a lot of promising flights and successes with the hobbyist aircraft, the Slow Sticks and Easy Stars. But we also had a lot of technical challenges and crashes that made us question the sustainability and repeatability of the ultra-cheap systems for our scientific research and technological development stage.
Enter the Mikrokopter Hexacopter. The Mikrokopter line of remote controlled aircraft offers precision control and GPS navigation. Last Friday we made our first demonstration of the GPS-assisted navigation over the Herbert Run site. The Photosynth generated from those photos is here, http://bit.ly/bqAhzL, and while it looks similar to the rest of our aerial synths, it is generated with photos taken along a pre-designated path at a constant altitude. Remarkable!
I expect things to progress quickly this fall (that dissertation is calling) and we have set up another blog for weekly progress about the nitty-gritty of Ecosynth research, http://ecotope.org/ecosynth/blog/. I will continue working with this blog as a reference for the methods and research progress and the ‘weekly’ should be a place to go for latest in weekly goings-on in the Ecosynth lab.
Thanks team, we could not have gotten here without all of your hard work.