Drones!

Hey fellow nerds! Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the week! I can’t believe it’s already June and officially summer! Between moving into a new place and doing deep edits on my thesis proposal, I’m working on a new summer schedule now that I don’t have to TA or take classes. I’m using the extra time to focus on research, and maybe a few fun things like shopping and traveling.

Got to hike to the Bright Angel Trail with my Dad and Sam in May!

Anyway, I’m itching to talk about drones! I’ve been working with and flying drones a lot this past semester as a way to learn a new skill for data acquisition for my research. It turns out learning how to fly a drone is not as easy as it looks…

The struggle is real!

But it’s been incredibly fun! You can fly drones for a number of reasons, whether it’s professional or recreational, like fancy-looking videos, photos, and surveys. For me, I’m learning that I can take large scale but detailed imagery of my study sites so that I can create high-quality hydrologic models for my research. To practice, I first performed a survey of a stretch of Revere Beach north of Boston:

Here's my study site on Revere Beach!

The purpose of the survey was to make sure that drone surveys could actually serve as an efficient alternative to manually conducted surveys for measuring beach erosion. We flew four flights on a beautiful April morning and were able to create this map:

Here's the orthmosaic showing the imagery from the drone survey with the locations of the four manual cross sections.

It was tricky, though. We were so close to the Boston Airport that the FAA authorities asked us to fly below an altitude of 80 feet to make sure we didn’t run the risk of hitting any planes. On top of that, piping plovers were nesting nearby, so we had to make sure that our drone didn’t disturb the birds. Luckily, we were not hit either a plane or a bird, and were able to come up with a few comparisons of manual to drone surveys:

 

Some of the cross sections are a little nicer than others!

I’m still doing some image processing to make the imagery a bit more accurate, and when I get it, I’ll definitely post it! But, in the meantime, feel free to contact me or comment below if you have any thoughts or questions!