From Swissinfo.ch:
…Friedlaender and his colleague, David Johnston, from the Practice of Marine Conservation and Ecology at Duke University, are two of the American scientists involved in the project. They and their teams are responsible for programming, transmitting and analysing the data collected by the aerial drones.
They had been using these drones for other work, to count animals such as seals or penguins in remote places, and thought it would be good to pair up using drone technology with the boat. “There are special lenses that you can put on the drone’s camera, and you will get images that will show the plastics very well, separate from the background,” Friedlaender explained.
…When the boat arrives at a new location, the US scientists, linked by satellite, send the programme for the drone’s flight and the crew upload the flight information to the drone.
After that, they can “literally throw the drone up into the air and it goes on to collect all the data as programmed and then returns. The crew will fly as many missions in a given location as we tell them. When they call into the next port they will download the data onto a hard drive, which is sent to us. Once we begin our analysis it won’t take long to get results and we can start mapping the data.”So far, the programme hasn’t experienced any glitches. The mapping data which has been compiled is considered open source and made available online.
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.