Core Problem
In Norfolk, VA there is tidal flooding on a monthly basis. When you add to that, hurricanes or rain the end result can cost millions of dollars for local residents. Taking aerial images during tidal flooding will help the city of Norfolk keep a running record of flooding. This can help the city plan for future building projects. This can also help prepare residents to move their valuable items before a hurricane or heavy rainfall to avoid costly any annoying repairs. Once Norfolk can achieve this record keeping we believe surrounding cities who deal with this same issue will start to take photographic record keeping.
Objectives
Build a quadcopter that will take aerial photos in areas that are prone to tidal flooding. Then, with the help of the team mentor, combine these photos is GIS software to gather one image of the flooding and compare it to normal tide waters.
Technical Description
Our team has developed a quadcopter with a gimbal attached to the bottom of the chassis. This gimbal houses a GoPro 3 which will record aerial videos of the areas surrounding ODU that are prone to tidal flooding. The quadcopter will be manually flown to 30 different GPS way points in each trip and hover around 5-ft above the ground. The GoPro will record the whole time and will stop at each waypoint for 60 seconds. Once the flight is done the user can receive 30 images from the video at each GPS waypoint. Using this GPS data the user can upload the photos into GIS and on whole image can be processed.
Iterative Process
We thought our project was going to be more simple then it ended up being. First off our gimbal caused our quadcopters legs not to reach the ground. We tried 3D printing legs that would attach to the bottom of the legs, but they were still not stable enough. Our end result was to buy an attachment that hooked onto the gimbal, so it would have a stable surface to take off, land, and calibrate.
Another issue we found was after we took the first set of photos and tried loading them into the GIS software. Because of the GPS and altitude inaccuracy on the quadcopter, the GIS software could not connect all 24 photos together. We would have had to manually do this, but our project mentor who runs the software did not think the time spent on doing that would be worth it.
Prototyping
Our prototyping was simple because we only had 3 moving parts. We only prototyped our quadcopter and ran test flights to make sure each team member could operate it safely.
Objective Change
Our objectives did change over time. We wanted to have a finished product with a finished GIS image. Once we did our test flight we found out we did not have everything we needed to accomplish this goal, so we focused on getting our drone ready and using the first set of photos and previous photos our Team mentor provided to be able to hand this project off to future teams, so they have a better staring place then we had.
Mentor Impact
Our mentor did change our end goal objective. Originally we wanted to take a long running video during the flight and then manually screen shot photos from that point, but our mentor wants the future product to be fully automated and take pictures instead of videos also automated because the quality of the photos is better and less manual work needs to be done.
Customer
If you wanted to commercialize this project we would need a much more accurate GPS and altitude sensor for our quadcopter. Those two issues made our project extremely challenging. Our customer would be the city of Norfolk for starters. Then with their success in record keeping many cities who deal with this issue would love this technology.
Broader Impacts
We could also expand our customer base to contractors who could use this record keeping at construction sites and save a lot of money on aerial photography. Historians could also use this too compare historic site photos to present day photos. Environmentalists could also be interested in this technology for keeping a record of water levels and ice cap level records.
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