UAS Mission Planning and Execution

Introduction

In previous exercises I’ve discussed the mission planning aspect with a theoretical execution plan. Last post was about mapping with a balloon but this time we used a UAS. The UAS has many advantages over the balloon but also many disadvantages. The mission planning phase of the flight was the most tedious compared to any other method discussed before with special care taken to ensure that everything was set up perfectly because when dealing with an expensive tool like a UAS you don’t want to carelessly look over something; that could lead to disastrous outcomes. The UAS used was a Y6 rotocopter with six propellers on three arms (one on top and one on bottom of each arm.)

Study Area

For the UAS flight the Eau Claire soccer complex was used. With numerous soccer fields the area is primarily flat but there is a concessions building in the middle of the study area and around the area are neighborhoods with pine trees spread throughout them.

Methods

A flight plan checklist was used to make sure that every little step was completed before moving onto the flight phase. If a step is missed it could lead to the UAS not collecting any imagery or worse, the UAS simply flying away on its own. Flying a UAS can be performed with one person but it is recommended to have three people on duty, a pilot who will manually control the UAS if needed, an engineer to fix the UAS, and another pilot who is at the computer making sure the UAS hits all of the preloaded checkpoints.

Ground control points were loaded into the Y6 which would direct the UAS on where to go. The software being used to program the Y6 is called Mission Planner and is an open source program. After the control points were set the height of the flight was entered. This is important because if the UAS isn’t flying high enough it may run into trees or buildings. Looking over the study area is crucial for this part of the planning.

Fig. 1. The Mission Planner software used for the Y6

Fig. 2. The mission planning software with the control points entered and a flight path constructed for the Y6 to follow

Fig 3. Mission Planner software allows for you to upload your own basemap for you to set the control points on and also shows the status of the UAS on the screen.

With the control points and height entered into the program the next step is to execute the flight. With a battery life of only 15-20 minutes the flights must not cover too large of an area or else the Y6 will not be able to complete the mission and most likely would crash. Since the Y6 is able to fly at a quick pace it is still able to gather plenty of imagery to cover a similar area as to what was covered with the balloon in a previous blog post. The camera attached to the Y6 collected imagery every 5 seconds once it reached the specified height.

Results

Fig 4. An image of a house collected by the Y6. Imagery of this quality (12 megapixels) can be very beneficial to police, firefighters, or other emergency workers.

Fig. 5. Another image showing the quality of the imagery taken during the flight. Even though it was a very windy day the Y6 still performed a steady flight and retrieved high quality imagery.

Discussion

With the ability to almost automatically fly a UAS the quality of the images collected is amazing and even though they aren’t perfect they can be correct in a host of image editing software. One major disadvantage of the UAS is that one needs a certificate of authorization to fly one meaning that the FAA has to grant you permission. This can be a major hassle and with the cost of a UAS it may not be worthwhile to some to go this route. This is where the balloon method has an advantage (Can also be performed with a kite).

Conclusions

A UAS is an incredible tool and mission planning software allows it to fly along pre-constructed paths almost taking out the human element to it. There are many organizations which would love to have imagery collected at a much higher rate than anything the government is currently providing and using a UAS (or balloon or kite) to collect the imagery allows them to see what they want, when they want.