Drones are taking to the skies to help researches discover whats going on beneath our feet. Via EOS:
A review of the geosciences literature shows that drones are now actively applied toward several objectives and across many fields (Figure 1). The latest generation of drones is especially versatile because these drones can carry payloads of sensors and sampling equipment capable of collecting an impressive variety of images, physical samples, and synoptic measurements.
| Check it out! |
| Fig. 1. The number of American Geophysical Union (AGU) abstracts that contain the term “UAS,” “UAV,” or “drone” (a) through time and (b) visualized as a tree diagram, with the size of each square depicting the number of abstracts per year from 2000 to 2016 and color indicating different AGU sections. Data for 2017 are currently being generated. Click image for larger version. |
1. Drones characterize topography. In recent years, drones have increasingly assisted with the photogrammetry technique known as structure from motion (SfM), where 2-D images are transformed into 3-D topographic surfaces (Figure 2). This technique provides high-resolution topographic imagery, which can be used to augment existing topographic data as well as to identify microtopographic features like small water channels on the surface of a glacier.
Read on to learn 5 more ways drones are being used in Geoscience!
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.