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.
Usually manned and unmanned aircraft don’t fly in close proximity for very good reason, but we were granted an exemption on Tuesday, April 9th 2019. As part of a joint Headwall and NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and operated by Battelle) project, a Headwall drone and a DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter, one of the NEON Airborne Observation Platforms (AOPs), where flown simultaneously in controlled airspace within a short drive of the University of Colorado – Boulder.
The Systems and Technologies for Remote Sensing Applications Through Unmanned Aerial Systems (STRATUS) workshop at the Rochester Institute of Technology is always fun yet educational, and a great opportunity for those of us in industry to meet with researchers and students.
As remote sensing evolves, users across all applications are discovering the value of adding LiDAR instruments to a hyperspectral payload. First, instruments of all types are getting smaller and lighter. Second, UAVs are more capable than ever in terms of carrying capacity and airborne stability. Finally, users across agriculture, minerals and mining, and environmental research can now collect a full suite of useful data at one time. With powerful GPS/IMU devices to tie the data streams together, a completely integrated hyperspectral-LiDAR airborne package is now the 'gold standard' for many remote sensing missions.
