Michigan State University officials hope to collaborate with a landscape services company to use unmanned aerial vehicles to determine turf health.
Researchers are testing if they can determine turf health with an infrared camera mounted on a jogging stroller before buying a drone o do it from the air. Photo: Bob Goodwin
Cameras capable of detecting different waves of light will be mounted on an unmanned aircraft to take pictures of the turf below. Those pictures will determine what areas of land need extra attention.
The idea is to mount an infrared camera onto an unmanned aerial vehicle – commonly known as a drone – which would take numerous overlapping pictures of a golf course. The images would then be compiled into one large picture of the entire course.
“We’re looking at both thermal infrared and short wave infrared sensors to identify moisture differences,” said Bob Goodwin, an analyst for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems, a Michigan State University group that does research with remote sensing technologies.
From the pictures, analysts will look at the health of turf based on its different levels of “greenness,” Goodwin said. Moisture differences determined by the greenness of the grass will help make decisions about irrigation patterns.
Goodwin declined to identify the company because of the competitive nature of the research.
But MSU is not alone.
People across the country are using unmanned aerial vehicles for similar applications, said Jeff Bollig, director of communications for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.
“It’s a good way to look at irrigation distribution issues from the air,” said Larry Stowell, a researcher with Pace Turf, a turf grass and pest management company in San Diego.
Stowell uses a color camera on an unmanned aerial vehicle to look at issues like drainage problems and gopher tracks on golf courses and sports fields. Similar to Goodwin’s project, Pace Turf takes pictures to see what areas need help based on the green color.
Before the project really takes off, MSU researchers aretesting the ability to determine turf health with an infrared camera mounted on a boom on a jogging stroller. Given that initial research on the ground is successful, a type of drone will be chosen to mount a camera and begin flying by next April.
This story is part of Great Lakes Echo’s ‘Skywatch’ series (UAV Photo: APV Hovershots)
Goodwin is about half way through piloting ground school, a step required to fly for research. The goal is to obtain a certificate of authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly an unmanned aerial vehicle in public airspace.
Although it is currently illegal to fly for commercial purposes, the Michigan State University remote sensing group says they’re well positioned to do research projects such as this one, which is allowed under the certificate of authorization.
There’s a new place to get replacement parts when you inevitably smash your drone. Photo via Tyler Olsen
The rise of autonomous flying robots has piqued the interest of everyone down to US TV personality Martha Stewart, who told Tech Crunch she would like her life “run by drones.”
For those without deep pockets, however, getting in on the UAV fun isn’t always easy—drones aren’t cheap, nor are the parts. But a growing number of websites are trying to make drones more accessible by helping users build their own at a reasonable cost. Joshua Allen Johnson was inspired to start his own do-it-yourself drone universe after working as an assistant administrator to Chris Anderson, the former Wired editor who is now behind the well-known amateur drone-building site DIY Drones.
Johnson’s new venture CAD Drones addresses one problem in particular: It’s increasingly common for commercial drone companies to leave the sale of replacement parts up to third-party dealers. If you break a propeller on a DJI drone—a company which doesn’t sell replacement parts on its website—you have to go to a site like Helipal, where a set of two carbon propellers will cost you $21.90 plus shipping.
Johnson’s solution is to get it 3D printed instead. CAD Drones is an open-source community that connects customers with CAD designers and 3D printing companies to make bespoke parts for whichever bit of their drone they smashed into a wall. He said the same propeller would cost roughly five dollars in materials.
“If we nurture more competition within the hobby and commercial-grade drone market,” explained Johnson, “we will be able to successfully lower the costs of drones in this market tremendously.”
A 21-year-old CAD engineering student from Minneapolis, Johnson’s interest in home-built drones stems from his biggest childhood passions: tinkering with robotics and drones, and building websites. “So once I discovered DIY Drones around four years ago, it showed me that I can take and combine these hobbies of mine and find a career related to drones,” he said.
In the past he’s built websites, podcasts, and webisodes such as Drone Cafe and DIY Drones News, but CAD Drones has a unique attraction in that it’s an open-source community where people can share CAD files for drones and parts, as well as tips on designing drones with CAD software and 3D printing.
He said that the key goal in starting the CAD drones movement was to cut the costs of drone tech for the commercial sector by producing replacement parts and making them readily available online. There’s also a lot of potential for modifications, from general upgrades to whatever specific add-ons drone owners want to design themselves.
The CAD Drones site is still pretty new, but Johnson explained the 3D printing services page was aimed at two types of people. “New companies and online retailers have a chance to build replacement parts for popular drone systems at lower costs than what is currently being offered on today’s online retailers,” he said.
“Secondly, the 3D printing page is for those who know how to use CAD but don’t own a 3D printer or have a 3D printer that can complete the print they need. In all, we are trying to work on this page to create a place in which new companies, retailers, and hobbyists can find a source for their 3D printing needs.”
Johnson has a roster of experts to call for help when it’s needed, and for now the main challenge is getting the right parts to the right people. He’s already got his sights on expansion, however. “Once CAD Drones takes off like DIY Drones did, I plan on hiring two admins and 10 moderators as paid positions,” he said. Watch out, Mr. Anderson.
Comments Off on An Open-Source Community Wants to Fix Your Drone with 3D-Printed Parts
“Ask anyone who the most daring pilot is,” says Trappy himself, never one for false modesty. “The answer is probably going to be unanimous.”
But ask officials at the Federal Aviation Administration, and they’ll tell you Trappy is a 29-year-old Swiss thorn in their side named Raphael Pirker, someone who flies recklessly, flaunts the agency’s rules and might even threaten its slow, careful plans for the safe integration of commercial drones into American skies.
In 2011, the FAA slapped Pirker with a $10,000 fine after he flew his Styrofoam drone around the University of Virginia while filming an ad for the university’s medical school. With that, the most famous pilot in the underground drone world became a test case for the FAA’s authority to prohibit people from making money off their hobby.
Pirker has asked a judge with the National Transportation Safety Board to throw out the fine, and a decision is expected any day now. In the meantime, the case exposes what would seem to be a rather large loophole in the law: The FAA has been saying since 2007 that commercial drone use is not allowed, but the agency never went through the official rule-making channels to make it illegal. I asked an FAA spokesman at least five times whether flying a drone for profit is illegal and, after several attempts to follow up, was told that the agency was not prepared to answer that question.
As a result, the case against Pirker hinges not on whether he was operating a drone for commercial purposes but instead on whether the FAA can prove that he was flying in a “reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.” In other words, the FAA needs to show that Pirker could have killed someone or seriously damaged a building with what is essentially a flying toy. If the agency fails and his fine is thrown out, the ruling could be taken as a sign to would-be commercial drone operators that the FAA lacks the authority to stop them—at least until it can issue an official rule, a process that typically takes more than a year. All of which could mean that the agency’s multi-year effort to plan for the gradual introduction of commercial drones—with safety controls and privacy protections to reassure those who worry about allowing small, flying cameras to operate with impunity—would fall by the wayside as the skies immediately open to a buzzing, whirring horde.
Whether the FAA is ready or not, the drone age could suddenly be upon us.
***
Unmanned aircraft have been zipping through American skies since before there even was a Federal Aviation Administration. The Academy of Model Aeronautics, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting model airplane flight, was founded in 1936 and now has more than 140,000 members. But while model aviation has evolved—from a hobby dominated by ex-military pilots flying gas-powered airplanes to one popular among Silicon Valley types with iPad-controlled hexacopters—the laws that govern the skies haven’t kept up. This has especially become a problem as technologies like high-definition cameras and smartphone integration have made even very small drones—some no bigger than a songbird—potentially useful tools for a variety of businesses.
The FAA has never officially regulated model airplanes or small drones. The closest it has come was an “advisory” issued in 1981 that created a set of voluntary guidelines for model aircraft: stay within the line of sight, do not fly within three miles of an airport, do not fly a model airplane higher than 400 feet. Then, in 2007, the FAA said in a policy statement that the 1981 advisory applies only to hobbyists, not to businesses—a move the agency has repeatedly said makes the commercial operation of drones illegal. Back in 2007, the FAA said it would soon release new rules for small commercial drones, but it still has not produced those rules and just this month announced that they wouldn’t be ready until at least November.
In the meantime, countries in Europe and Asia have run laps around the United States in their use of commercial drones, and companies in South America and Africa are looking to get in on the action as well. In July, I met Ernesto Sanchez, a representative from North Carolina’s UTC Aerospace Systems, at an air show in Colombia. He was there because the company isn’t allowed to sell drones in the United States except to public agencies that have an FAA waiver. “Our business has been limited by what we can do in the United States,” he told me. “Here, we’re not seeing that as much.”
***
Two years ago, Congress pushed the FAA to speed things up when it passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which directed the agency to release guidelines for commercial drones within a year and to have a plan for commercial drones to begin flying “no later than September 30, 2015.”
Since then, the FAA has missed nearly every deadline Congress set—in part, critics say, because the agency didn’t have the foresight to take the rise of the drone age seriously. “Ten years ago, the FAA said [unmanned aerial vehicles] were never going to amount to anything, that they’d be a niche market,” says Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot who runs Duke University’s Humans and Automation Laboratory. “They’ve created a rigid system that can’t tolerate new, disruptive technologies.”
Comments Off on Drones Could Be Coming to American Skies Sooner Than You Think
Bernard Magrez, owner of 40 chateaus/wineries around the world, has floated a first for Bordeaux: unmanned drone surveillance.
Vitisphere reports that he has purchased a €50,000 octocopter with a camera to surveil his own vines at the rate of 25 acres an hour. That compares with a rate of about ten for a team of eight humans. Maybe the drone will spy on workers to see if zey are ze nap in zevineyards??
The drone has a range of eight miles and can go 8,000 feet high. No word if it can alsodeliver Amazon orders. But it will probably contribute to promotional videos for the estates.
Drone Autohacks other Drones, and you can Build one Too!
With Amazon making headline news about their automatic drone deliveries, a security consultant has released his plans for making a predatory type drone that takes over other drones.
Skyjack “Zombie Drone” software created by Samy Kamkar turns a Parrot AR Quadcopter drone into a flying hacking station that uses a Raspberry Pi and the Aircrack NG tools to find and take over other Parrot drones.
Non-Parrot drones should be safe from his design though, as it searches out for the Parrot’s particular MAC address, and only attacks Wi-Fi signals.
Let’s hope no one puts something like a WaveBubble on one of these Zombie Drone Attackers:
A WaveBubble, though highly illegal to actually build, finds and jams all RF signals in its proximity. This includes GPS, Wi-Fi, Cell Phones, BlueTooth, etc…)
A drone equipped with both technologies (which we don’t support or recommend) could, in effect, try to hack a Wi-Fi based drone and take it over, and if that didn’t work, could possible jam the drones signals and cause it to crash.
Oh the joys of technology…
Sammy has released the plans for his project, see the above YouTube page for links.
Comments Off on Drone Autohacks other Drones, and you can Build one Too!
The ominously named Predator drone. (Photo: Getty)
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane — it’s a Predator drone finding you because you wouldn’t give your neighbor his cows back after they wandered onto your property.
That’s right: Rodney Brossart, a farmer from North Dakota, was located by Predator drone and arrested, Forbes reports. Sentenced yesterday, he is the first American to be sent off to prison thanks to drone assistance.
In June 2011, Forbes reports, police attempted to arrest him because he wouldn’t return three cows that had grazed onto his property. This resulted in “an armed standoff between Brossart, his three sons and a SWAT team” on his property. It ended only after the family of perps was located by a Predator drone borrowed from Customs and Border Patrol.
Mr. Brossart tried to have the case dismissed on the grounds that there was no warrant for the drone surveillance, but a federal judge rejected his motion.
Forbespoints out that it’s disconcerting that drones created to protect American borders are now being used to apprehend American citizens, although a manned helicopter could have done the same thing. The danger, though, is that widespread drone use could be easier to achieve than buying a helicopter for every local precinct in the country.
Let this be a lesson to us all: next time, just give the damn cows back.
We’ve all heard about the rise of eco drones, but this is something else: In Alabama, the use of drones to harass hunters has apparently become such a problem that a state senator has drafted legislation to explicitly bar such activities.
State Sen. Roger Bedford, a Democrat, wrote the bill despite harassment of hunters already being illegal in Alabama. As he explains in a a draft of bill SB 240, “Existing law prohibits a person from willfully and knowingly preventing, obstructing, impeding, disturbing, or interfering with another person who is legally hunting or fishing. This bill would specifically include the use of drones to harass a person who is hunting or fishing within this prohibition.”
Why is such explicit language necessary? “It’s apparently a growing problem,” Bedford told theTimes-Daily last week. “As a lifelong hunter and fisherman, I think if someone is out in the woods or on the water, they have a right to be there without being harassed.”
It’s a sentiment that any hunter could agree with (“As a hunter I certainly don’t want a drone flying overhead,” wrote Eric Mason on ALDucks.com), as could just about anyone spending time outside. Who wants to go for a walk while a drone buzzes overhead?
PETA’s pestering drones at work
But it’s hunters, not walkers, that have been the target of drone pestering. Earlier this year, Illinoisalso banned the use of drones to harass hunters in response to a PETA drone initiativeannounced last April. The initiative, which used drones PETA refers to as Air Angels, was aimed at “patrolling the skies [last] fall, capturing footage of hunters engaging in cruel and/or illegal activities.”
Naturally, the plan caught the ire of hunters who’d rather not have drones zipping around and scaring off game. And while Illinois and Alabama legislators are fighting back with their pens, somesites like Ammoland have advocated a more direct approach, writing, “Sounds to me like this will create a whole new shooting sport. ‘PETA Drone Target Shooting.'” Noted drone shooting advocate Philip Steel is surely on board.
Oddly enough, it’s not the only controversy between drones and hunters floating around. Drones are being been used by hunters in the search for game, which has received pushback from wildlife experts and some hunting advocates, who feel drones take the skill out of the sport.
As Paul Smith, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s outdoors editor, argues in an op-ed, the use of drones poses a “special threat to outdoors ethics.” Of particular interest to the proposed drone ban in Alabama: Smith also notes that the use of drones to hunt or harass hunters are both illegal in Wisconsin, but that hasn’t stopped people from doing so.
That slight buzzing overhead may be a UAV following you. The Drone Shield can tell you whether you’re crazy or being stalked. But the device’s biggest market could be businesses and security firms.
A project that started out in May as an Indiegogo lark to build an open-source drone-detecting device, mostly intended for paranoid homeowners, has turned into a more serious business for the two engineers behind the idea.
Comments Off on Your New Security System Will Protect You From Drones
A RCMP Dragonfly quadcopter drone is displayed at the SGI Distracted Driving event in Regina.
An Indiana House committee is examining a bill that would limit the use of police drones and electronic surveillance.
The bill, introduced by State Rep. Eric Koch, R-Bedford, would regulate police use of unmanned aircraft and would prohibit the use of surveillance without a court order.
The bill would also regulate the placement of cameras on private property.
Koch’s bill comes after an Indianapolis Star story revealed that Indiana State Police had acquired “Stingray” technology that potentially can be used to collect cellphone data from hundreds of people at a time.
“Because technology has moved so much faster than the law, we need to define new lines of Fourth Amendment protections,” Koch, R-Bedford, said. “Requiring a warrant to be issued by a judge upon sworn probable cause before a search and seizure is a bedrock of our freedoms. These constitutional protections are not waived by use of a cell phone or email.”
The bill also comes on the heals of companies pledging to invest more heavily in drone research in the state.
The Federal Aviation Administration last month passed over Indiana as a federally-designated drone testing site, but officials with the National Center for Complex Operations said they still plan to pursue the development of drone technology.
Network Indiana contributed to this report.
Comments Off on Bill Would Limit Police Use Of Drones, Surveillance
