Headwall Mid-West Regional Sales Engineer Christopher Piper, Senior Application Scientist Will Rock, Ph.D., and Senior UAV Pilot Charles Kepler hosted a free flight demo and an exclusive presentation by Headwall at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Headwall customer Associate Professor Felipe Gonzalez, at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Institute for Future Environments and the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision is using Headwall hyperspectral imaging from airborne UAVs to monitor and analyze the health of the Great Barrier Reef has received part of the $50 million AI for Earth program by Microsoft.
Our customers come to us with missions that range from crop disease detection to infrastructure inspection, from environmental monitoring to pollution analysis. Hyperspectral imaging sensors provide a wealth of high-resolution data in the near-infrared and shortwave infrared ranges...beyond human vision. But we see an increasing level of integration occurring where hyperspectral rides alongside instruments such as thermal, LiDAR, and GPS/IMUs. The data streams coming from each instrument need to be synthesized ('data fusion') but the instruments themselves need to be positioned and located on the UAV to assure a balanced airborne package.
Remote sensing with hyperspectral sensors is a combination of several elements: an imaging spectrometer and a fast data processing system to acquire and analyze spectral and spatial data. For remote sensing missions such as crop disease or invasive species detection, the spectral range of most interest is the visible-near-infrared (VNIR) from 400-1000nm.
Humans have a marvelous ability to see and identify objects within what is called the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. That starts at roughly 380 nanometers and goes up to around 700 nanometers or so.
We’re seeing a tremendous increase in the number of airborne deployments for our hyperspectral imaging sensors. To a large degree, the trend toward smaller and more affordable UAVs is giving the remote sensing community more flexibility to undertake more missions to capture meaningful environmental data. From wine-grape vineyards in northern California to coffee bean plantations in South America, the precision agriculture community is embracing packaged ‘UAS’ offerings that combine a UAV matched to the payload it needs to carry.
FITCHBURG, MA - OCTOBER 9, 2014: Headwall Photonics has delivered two high-performance hyperspectral imaging sensors to Columbia University as part of its Air-Sea-Ice Physics and Biogeochemistry Experiment (ASIPBEX). ASIPBEX is part of a larger international collaborative investigation of Climate Cryosphere Interaction with colleagues from Spain, Germany and Norway. This crucial remote-sensing project will use a high-endurance unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to investigate climatological changes present in the Arctic Ocean around Svalbard, Norway. The instrument payload comprises two Micro-Hyperpsec sensors; one will cover the Visible-Near-Infrared (VNIR) range of 400-1000nm while the other will cover the Near-Infrared (NIR) range of 900-1700nm. Together, the sensors will be crucial in detecting indicators of sea ice physics, solar warming and global carbon cycles.
At Headwall we've been busy listening to the market. When it comes to airborne remote sensing, the market is telling us that they favor UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) of all kinds: fixed-wing, multi-rotor, and so on. There's no end to the number of companies producing UAVs globally. Because many UAVs produced today are very small and affordable they are 'within reach' of those with even modest means. Universities represent one key market where the use of UAVs is rapidly increasing. Full of scientists and research departments, universities around the globe see these small and light UAVs as a perfect platform from which to launch their exploratory studies. They are affordable, easy to assembly and transport, and (especially with multi-rotor models) can take off and land within a very small footprint.
Under cloudless skies in Ontario recently, Headwall achieved a very notable milestone: we became the first to fly both hyperspectral and LiDAR aboard a small, fully integrated handheld UAS. The test flights not only verified the reliable airworthiness of the system but also the ability to collect valuable hyperspectral and LiDAR data in real time.
