November 8th, 2018
Field Outing

Today for lab we decided to do some work at professor Hupy's house. As a class we focused on ground control points and mission planning. Professor Hupy needed some video and images of his yard while it was already marked by flags for some construction work he is doing, and we decided to take advantage of the already marked yard to collect data for him. The first thing we covered was forming the mission and deciding the path for the drone to fly, and specific camera angles that the gimbal would be set at. After deciding the path and specifics for the drone we put out 9 ground points to help collect more data for the flight. Professor Hupy taught us that we needed to spread out these points over the entire area of flight, and not focus them all in one area, or the data would be distorted and skewed. We were told to carefully take note of the order we placed the ground points at because in order to not mess up the data, we needed to pick them back up in opposite order from the way we placed them (see figures). After placing the ground control points we needed to properly calibrate the drone because the drones last flight was over 5 miles away from Hupy's house. Krysta Rolle was the pilot for the first mission, and I was in charge of helping her calibrate the H520 Yuneec drone. After calibration and proper setup we flew the mission as planned collecting data successfully!

The ground control points in order as placed:
1. By large oak tree in front yard
2. By pile of bricks
3. By the river
4. In the middle of the path back from river
5. By the log pile
6. Front yard by the cars
7. By the trampoline point
8. The only point across the street
9. Driveway checkpoint