UAS Capstone Connor Yoder

This week we were able to present our work for the semester, the presentation is available by clicking on the image above.

Thursday, November 14th was GIS day at Purdue University. Purdue had the opportunity to host speakers from many different fields, all who had unique backgrounds and ways they used GIS in their day-to-day work. The morning started off with a few quick talks from students using GIS. One was analyzing the shift in forest communities in the eastern United States, one was plotting religious sites and zones in China, and the last was one of my classmates who demonstrated how to use GIS to plan UAS missions. This led straight into the keynote speaker for the day: Dr. Carly Sakumura, a research and devopment scientist at Maxar Technologies. The day also contained a lunch where all the speakers had the chance to go through each their own background and how they made their way into GIS, and the day wrapped up with a few more speakers and the poster presentations. It was neat to see all the different ways GIS is being used. I am used to seeing GIS as it relates to UAS technology, but at GIS day...

Last week  we presented our GIS poster rough draft to the class  to receive critiques and make necessary changes before GIS  day on November 7 th , 2019.  Below are the critiques we received from the class and Dr. Hupy,  we took into consideration all critiques and made changes we thought were necessary.  Our final poster is pictured below, click on the image to view the full-size figure.    Critiques: ·           Hupy o     Bad title o     Too much details, reword title. Explain what we’re actually doing o     Think in terms of somebody unknowledgeable ·           Jasper o     Likes layout o     Less text o     Clean, title more centered ·           Sam o     Question about compar...

GIS Day Abstract We continue to prepare ourselves for Purdue GIS day, we have created a rough draft of our poster to be presented and developed an abstract that summarizes our project very well. This poster and abstract need to get the viewers attention very quick and be able to showcase the focus of our research effectively. Our abstract is a quick overview for viewers to give them a good idea of who we, what we are doing and how we will be achieving it. Our main focus is to implement UAS effectively into search and rescue operations, we do this through the Loc8 software. A quick overview of how this is done and an introduction to the software allow viewers to quickly and effectively know the scope of our work. A copy of our abstract can be found  here. GIS Day Poster Figures To showcase our findings it is important for us to visually compare the time it takes for us to complete a mission with UAS and the time it takes to complete a mission using traditional methods. For our...

Now that we have entered the advanced stages of our senior design capstone project, we are full swing on data collection and experiment implementation. Over the previous 7 weeks our focus was determining the direction we want to take this project and designing experiments and various scenarios to test the Loc8 program. It is our goal to determine and prove that Loc8 is a faster method of locating a lost person or item in a search and rescue type scenario then traditional methods. During our preliminary research and testing we had difficulties demonstrating the usefulness and speed of this program as it appeared using the more traditional "squinting" method of looking for an item in a photograph was faster. However, as we worked with Loc8 more and received proper training, we began to get a sense for how we needed to use the program to gain its greatest efficiency. The goal this week was to run the experiments we had designed to officially determine whether or not Loc8  is a f...

As GIS day approaches faster and faster, November 7th to be exact, we continue to make progress on the poster we will present. GIS day is a great opportunity for us to present our capstone research involving Search & Rescue missions utilizing UAV data, and an innovative software called Loc8. Our poster has made great strides since we created our template a few weeks ago. Now, we have nearly-complete sections covering the overview of our project and group, our objectives, data collecting and testing methodology, results, discussion, future direction, and more. We are very proud of the continued progress we have made on our poster, and will continue to improve upon it until the conference. We have continued to collect data throughout the period of working on our poster, and have been running tests and experiments with our software as well. Our continued findings, and learnings, have helped us add a lot of depth to our poster. As we get nearer to GIS day, we will continue to add an...