Day 17

Today I started working on my individual project, which is to image, map and create a 3D model of the cliffs surrounding the valley. Although I don’t plan on getting all of the cliffs done because my individual project is about the method of mapping and modelling a vertical landscape, so I can concentrate on a section of the cliffs. I started out working on a flight plan to image the cliffs, but found that it was really hard placing waypoints that go up instead of forward or backward. The software used to deal with the arduino pilot is mission planner, and I got a lot of experience using it the other day when I was making flight plans for the planes. However, Mission Planner is designed with a Google map or any other top down map, so it’s really hard to place waypoints when the are right on top of each other. So, I gave up trying to create a viable flight plan and decided to try to fly the cliffs manually with one of the quad copters. We were able to mount our Pentax Optio to the phantom quad copter at an angle sot that it was pointing out instead of down and I felt like I got pretty good imagery.

Before I flew the cliffs for systematic imagery we took video of a flight going to the top of the  cliffs, here it is, pretty spectacular :