Day 13

The plan today was to work in the morning on our common product presentation and have the afternoon off. Scott and I started working on our product and the work was increasingly frustrating until Dr. Lipo showed up and cleared up which logs went with which UAV flight. We had it wrong and it was really causing a lot of trouble for us. We weren’t present or prepared for each of the flights and therefore didn’t know for sure which data went with which flight. This caused us to work for hours on end with horrible results, frustrating to say the least. Part of the problem was that during the first flight, the memory card on board the UAV was full and stopped recording images, so when Scott and I compared images to flight paths, they didn’t make sense. The longest, most systematic flight should have had the most imagery, but because of the memory card issue, the longest and most systematic flight we had actually had the least amount of imagery. This news allowed us to get the right logs linked up with the right flights, which allowed us to match up the telemetry logs with the photos, allowing us to geotag the photos so that the software that puts the photos together can work properly. With things finally in the right place we were finally able to produce decent mosaic images of the entire flights, which is our final deliverable, among other things. Now we can be proud of the method that we developed to geotag the photos that come from the UAVs, something that as far as I’m aware of, hasn’t been done, at least as far as our REU program goes.

At around 1 we took off towards the north shore of Oahu. It was a much needed break, we all had a great time. We met up in the town of Haleiwa and had lunch and hung out checking out the local shops. Some of the students went kayaking, something that I love to do, but I went snorkeling, something I love more. Once I hit the water with my gear on, I didn’t come out for 2 hours. I spent all that time floating among the reef taking pictures of urchins, fish and an eel. We hung out on the beach in Hale’iwa and watched the sun set. Then we headed back towards Kualoa and grabbed some L&L on the way back.

Once we got back, we had a little celebration for James’s birthday and started crunching some more UAV imagery and preparing our presentation. Now that, we’re just about ready for tomorrow’s presentation, it’s time for bed.