Day 12

Ah yes

Today we started out watching a short 1o minute movie about the history of Kualoa Ranch where our valley (Ka’a’awa Valley) is located. After that we headed into the field to let groups finish up anything they needed. There was also a guy bringing a laser scanner to the park and everyone was offered the opportunity to see the laser scanner in action. Everyone but me took the offer and headed out. I was alone, with not much to do, so I got out my computer and started working on some math/programming.

When we use UAVs to image the ground, we have to figure out how high to fly and how close our pictures should be together in order to stitch them all together later. There is a formula for figuring it out, but we didn’t have the whole thing in an easy to use calculator. So, if we want 70% overlap on our photos, we have to use a calculation that Dr. Lipo sent me as a python script, we have to take one of the products of that calculation, cut it in half and take 30% of that. So, I modified the python script he gave me so that we can just input the 70% or 80% and it will give us how many meters apart our photos should be. It was my first stab at python and I was able to jump right in. It was really cool, I felt really good that we now have a tool that I can just run on my computer that will tell us what we need to know before we plan out the flight path of our UAVs.

After that, most people started coming back from either finishing in the field or watching the laser scanning, so we grabbed a bite and headed back to the house. We were given some time off and so I hit the beach with some of the others.

The plan is to have Saturday afternoon off, but we have to be almost done with our common products by Sunday afternoon. So Saturday morning is supposed to be work. Most of us were determined to finish working tonight so that we could enjoy Saturday. I think we all knew that it was a lot of work and it was going to spill into Saturday morning no matter what, which is definitely the case for me. I’ve stayed up as late as I can and I’ve been sleeping at my laptop, this blog is my last task of the night while my computer cpu runs at 100% trying to build a 3d model of our valley out of 400 photos taken from a UAV. I wanted to get that process started and have it run while I slept.

Some fish I saw today

In order to get that done, I worked hard to get the data from the flight recorder in the UAV and link it up with photos that were taken from the UAV. Unfortunately, the UAV cameras are good, but they don’t geotag the photos, so we don’t know where they are. But, the autopilot on the UAV knows where they are so, theoretically you could match them up, but nobody has done that before. Until tonight. I got it working, it was hard, but I’m really excited. I got all 400+ photos geotagged using the data from the UAV and I didn’t have to do it by hand to each individual photo, I made the computer do it, so that’s awesome. Anyway, it’s super late now, and I’m going to bed, I’m looking forward to seeing my results in the morning.