well. So while our next speaker is setting up
, we're going to switch gears and we're going to
be thinking about acquisition platforms. And so our next
speaker is Dr. Kevin Kohensberger is Associate professor of
Mechanical Engineering, specializes in unmanned aerial systems, but
very particularly in vibrations and dynamics, mechanical design,
aerostructures and aerodynamics. His research interests include adaptive air
vehicle design, low Reynolds numbers, aerodynamics, autonomous
rotorcraft systems and integration of unmanned aerial vehicles into the
national airspace system. Um, some of you may
be aware of just how prominent the research that he
and his colleagues have. Uh, you know,
do. It really is for Virginia Tech and so
we're really, really excited to have you here today
. So thank you. Okay, thank you very
much. I'm running on a Windows XP system and
support discontinued a few days ago. So Hold your
breath. It's only 20 minutes. We might make
it. Um, so thanks for the introduction.
Um, I run the unmanned systems lab out at
kempton while on Plantation Road and we operate a lot
of our aircraft Flights out of count on farms,
which is about seven miles from here. So what
I'm gonna do is talk about some of our activities
are unmanned aircraft. Our interests in a wide range
of remote sensing applications with unmanned aircraft and then uh
, talk about some specific applications and results that we've
got with our projects. So our focus mainly is
an autonomous, again autonomous aircraft research in the design
and development of novel and unique aircraft, um,
designs and payloads for specific applications ranging from um,
sensing radio activity. As you see this, this
aircraft in the middle here. Um, the aero
scott, the 1 100 carry radiation detector, a
stereo vision boom, a cable camera in the front
. And it's also designed to have an interchangeable robot
a little bit will go in there to drop down
and collect physical samples in the case of the Fukushima
type disaster. Need to go down not only central
radio activity, but then go pick up physical samples
. We can do that. Um, this airplane
up here was a morphine wing design, which morphed
into this morphine wing design here. Uh, no
moving control services here. The wings just flex based
on voltages that are the actuators. And then in
house design helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. We also
fly, So just a little bit of background on
the spectrum of operations of aircraft without people on board
. Um, the FAA was told by Congress back
in 2012 to uh, integrate unmanned aircraft into the
national airspace and do it expeditiously um, in the
, in And without those regulations. In the past
, we've operated under hobby recreational um, rules,
which says under£55.. If you're not doing this
for commercial purposes, you can basically fly under 400
ft three miles away from the airport. And then
with agreement on people on the ground. Um,
no problem. Uh, as soon as you want
to do commercial operations, though, things become a
little stickier. And then with this modernization reform act
, the Congress said, okay, we'll open that
up to two. You have to be no more
than five miles away from airports and then you can
be closer to the airport permission. So that made
a little bit more liberal liberal. Also, you
have to operate underline a site conditions, you never
lose sight of the aircrew. Okay, well,
these are rules now there as these hobby and amateur
operations rules being the only things out there for unmanned
aircraft, they're actually migrating unmanned aircraft operations for the
commercial side of the world. And so, um
, as, as Congress had mandated government use of
the aircraft again within 90 days of this rule that
came out in 2012, none of this has happened
. Okay, so we're looking at trying to get
more activities of business opportunities of commercial aircraft, get
the government Access to these aircraft for emergency response and
unfortunately it's going very slow. So they made up
, they took the amateur and hobby built rules and
just applied those two emergency responders instead of your aircraft
is under two kg. You're operating under daylight conditions
, you're under 400 ft. It's essentially hobby rules
which have been out there for a long time.
This still hasn't been implemented. So we still can't
have um, use of these aircraft by emergency responders
. Even if there are no more than£4..
to kg in weight, it's kind of ridiculous.
Um, and so the other thing that Congress said
was, okay, well let's set up some test
sites so that we can expeditiously get the research into
the hands of the commercial operators and you know,
see a greater benefit of these aircraft in in in
all sectors of the economy. And so we were
mandated to set up the Congress mandated the FAA to
set up six test sites and those have been in
fact done. Um and then with the ultimate goal
of integrating unmanned aircraft into the national airspace totally by
september 30th 2015. So with these test sites that
are designated now, um the idea was to provide
a fast track to getting uh all unmanned aircraft no
matter how big they are into the operations as uh
with manned aircraft in a cooperative environment um all over
the country. So the six test sites that were
designated are there as you see in the list and
Virginia, New Jersey Maryland is one. Uh huh
. One partnership that forms a what we call a
mid atlantic aviation partnership. Um It's one of six
test sites. And then in addition to that,
new Mexico runs their own test site, which has
been out for about five years. I think they've
been operating um under FAA supervision policy. But again
, the layman's rules for unmanned aircraft, no commercial
operations are allowed only public aircraft operations. And this
is where we come in because we're a public agency
, we can uh we can apply for a waiver
of the federal aviation regulations and operate our aircraft as
a public aircraft. Um If your recreational or hobby
built, that's not a problem. But again,
it's it's kind of a strange world because of your
recreational hobby. You can fly any just about anywhere
under some loose guidelines under£55. But as soon
as you want to do this for a business,
a£1 U. A. V. Is treated
the same as a much larger and expensive heavier global
hawk under the previous rules. So it's very difficult
environment to operate in. Um And they're not going
to allow operations in densely populated areas or high traffic
areas. Um However, there have been some exceptions
to this as the FAA is trying to see more
aircraft in the public domain. So the path towards
commercial use um what we see is uh is an
opportunity for Virginia tech. And the other test sites
is to work with companies and and look at how
we can help them explore their uh their new their
new ideas, new concepts and how these aircraft will
benefit their businesses. Um And that's what the test
sites are for. We see agriculture as a very
, a very rich area to to direct are working
because we're operating in rural areas. We're not we're
working in populated areas from those parts. Everything on
the ground is in a cooperative control. It's a
corporate controlled environment, so you're not likely to run
into people who are stumbling into the field and have
aircraft flying over their heads. They're going to complain
about it. So, best uses the technology is
not going to put pizza delivery. Um I just
don't see that happening in the near future. I
could be wrong. Emergency response? Yes, very
big use for these aircraft. Again, we'd like
to see the F A a little bit more aggressive
about getting light small aircraft into the hands of emergency
responders, environmental monitoring. Another um area that's clearly
well suited for these aircraft and in rural remote areas
. Uh, infrastructure monitoring. If you're talking about
stockpiles at Corey's, we've developed systems to do stockpile
mapping. Um, the obvious things are power line
, pipeline patrol, highway infrastructure monitoring. We're talking
to Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and building a system for
them to look at a vehicle driver behavior and then
agriculture. Again, one of the areas that we
see as a very easy place to go at this
point. So some of the, wow, how
about that, that audience? Uh, some of
the things we've looked at our, uh, some
of the activities we've done in the past. This
is a Bureau of Land Management project to put stereo
vision on a very rugged aircraft could be landed in
rough conditions. In this case it was a sage
grouse uh, habitat that was of interest to be
monitored and was designed to be launched out of the
back of a pickup truck and beal and land in
the recovered as you see, perhaps in something as
rough as sage brush. I'll talk a little bit
about what I have, um, going out in
my lab, I have several undergraduate groups working on
unmanned systems and they are in my feet are uh
, brain trust my graduate programs. And this project
actually is very, it's very well connected with the
kinds of things that we do in remote sensing.
So the, this is an Australian autonomous vehicle competition
where the students have to build a completely autonomous system
that flies out into about a three by five mile
area, searches for a lost hiker. And when
the aircraft autonomously finds the hikers, drops the water
, but to them And hopefully it doesn't hit them
on the head, but within 100 m to get
credit. Um, so in this, in this
project, the students have built their own vision system
which is taking the imagery. Um, it looks
at the thresh, it does a threshold and the
morphology analysis uh, blob filters um goes through this
loop every time it takes a new picture and see
if you can find joe. Um, so here
and joe is wearing blue jeans. So blue jeans
actually show pretty good when you're Aaron brown and and
kind of burned out mm outback territory. So here
they are, they are they show up. However
, you do get some false positives, you can
barely see them there on the screen. There's some
false positives out of here. So then we do
color threshold and morphology and blog filtering. You get
a pretty positive indication of the blue jeans or in
the second year of this project and the teams kind
of finishing up right now. So we're going to
see if we can actually make to Australia. The
competitions in september um Again, it's really for me
it's training these students in vision uh technologies building electrical
hardware and testing it, that really helps the program
. Um So in agriculture we've done some some preliminary
work and the vision here is that um precision agriculture
can really be made more efficient with aircraft. And
the term precision agriculture has been out for quite a
while, which has meant precision scouting on the ground
and then precision application on the ground. But now
you can do all that in the air. So
it really speeds things up and having the ability with
accurate gps to go back and look at the same
place over and over again. You can do longitudinal
studies of your field. Um You can look at
, you know, wet areas that appear over and
over again and dry areas. It can help you
adapt your crops, um, longitudinal e In the
Virginia area. In the eastern part of the country
, we have smaller fields. So if you're talking
about 10-20 acre sized fields as opposed to the 10
to the 1000, 2000 size acre fields in midwest
. Uh, these are very good places to use
unmanned aircraft because they're smaller. They're harder to get
into with with the crop duster. They're not as
profitable for crop dusting. And so, um,
you know, all these things point towards unmanned aircraft
. Um, and so, you know, in
the case of late season corn that becomes too high
to send even a ground vehicle and let alone a
crop duster. If you're talking about stink bug infestation
, um, they only attack the perimeters of the
fields, so bringing in the heavy armor and spraying
the whole field doesn't make sense in those cases.
Small precision application does. Um So again, small
fields, high value crops are kind of what everybody
thinks of when we talk about using aerial vehicles for
this unmanned aerial vehicles, but actually wrote crops to
, and it all comes down to minimising chemical application
. And um, you know, so obvious applications
are going to be in the, in the tomatoes
, flowers, grapes and blueberries, the horticulture crops
, but not obviously the road crops, cotton,
tobacco, corn, peanuts, where you can perhaps
find localized problems in larger field and then and then
address them. And one of those things that stink
bugs. So again, stink bug, they tend
to attack the perimeters, they're not attacking the whole
field, being able to find that area and then
apply just the perimeter application greatly reduces the amount of
pesticide applied. Um and this doesn't really work well
with any kind of manned aircraft solution because it is
prohibitively expensive in small fields to get the aircraft in
there and do the applications, um, perimeter treatments
. You'd see something. This is actually an example
of where trees have taken the nutrients out of the
field in the perimeter and but it's very similar to
what you see was stink bug damage, where you
just really concerned about the perimeter of the field,
small fields, small area within a small field,
these are places run made aircraft can be very beneficial
in row crops if you're talking about something like rust
, um it starts with small isolated patches and if
you catch it early it's really easy to fix.
You know, you just do your small applications where
you need to, the whole field is fine.
But if it develops into a much bigger problem as
you see here, then you know, then you
are committed to treating the entire field at a much
greater expense. Mm And so there isn't much incentive
from the ePA to reduce applications of these chemicals.
But there should be. And that's really the new
direction in agriculture is ultra minimum application to get the
same yield or better yield. So the other insect
damage spider mites can cause peanuts to change a period
appearance and that can be visually detected the kudzu bug
, stink bug. Um we're looking at technologies and
had written actually detect detect the bugs directly on the
leaves. So it's pretty exciting technology. We can
do that. We have high resolution cameras that are
lightweight and go in small vehicles that can fly at
10 10 ft altitude around. And they can actually
detect the Beatles on the leaves. So that's kind
of a revolutionary change in how you treat problems now
. Um, and and again the fertilizer application or
pesticide application longitude only studied. Um, it can
be, it can be applied very specifically with,
with a wide variety of, of rates. We've
done some testing out accounting farms in in use of
NDVI with our max helicopter. You see here is
a£200 helicopter. And in this case we've,
we've taken the images and then some filtering using green
and V to come up with ultimately, a very
good correlation between the yield after harvest. We we
got a very good trend of yield with the NDVI
index that was a really obtain. Okay, So
it's one thing to use a green seeker and measure
your NDB on, on the ground. But the
question is, what, what problems do you run
into? And how applicable is it from the air
? We found it's very applicant. Um, we're
not the only ones doing this. This is nothing
novel in unmanned aircraft. However, um, there
, there are some single processing techniques that we've applied
in here that we feel are very beneficial. The
use of aerial imagery. We've also looked at tobacco
and this study was done to actually just explore what
possibilities there are with they're unmanned aircraft in tobacco.
Um, crop work. And so we flew actually
four sensors in this experiment. We flew ultraviolet visible
near infrared, long wave infrared. Um, and
this was in partnership with a company that provided the
center, uh, two of the sensors. And
then we flew this down at South Hill Virginia under
again a certificate of authorization that allows public operators to
fly on that aircraft. Um, we're able to
detect health of neighboring rows of, of tobacco.
We could we statistically had a significant difference in the
health of the rose. There were two different hybrids
. One was clearly a better hybrid for the weather
conditions that summer. And then we also went through
and uh came up with some visual spectra data that
we found significant to identify which leaves are bleached,
in which are green. So in this case the
original image on the left is then filtered to look
at the green leaves. Only in the bleach leaves
only using are just visual spectrum data. Um So
now you can determine when the time would be the
optimal time to harvest the tobacco would be. Ok
. So fly over it. You can determine how
much bleached versus living leaves there are. When do
you want to harvest the tobacco? Um And then
we got the other data, the the ultraviolet and
the long wave infrared data. Um Still analyzing that
information. Um It's probably useful for moisture content and
probably more useful for longitudinal studies than it was for
this uh particular experiment. So a lot of our
work um is unique in that we don't use light
are. It's because a legacy sponsor of my research
a long time ago said don't use light art because
I really would like to use lighter. But they
really forced this in the direction of using low cost
cameras. And so we over and over and over
again. We kept iterating on these designs and this
is a a two camera imaging system that we've used
on the R. Max too capture pretty good stereo
and structure from motion images. These are some examples
of stereo. Um The structure from Motion World is
nice because it gives you a very high accuracy maps
um that are essentially They're accurate because you're taking so
many images. Okay, so you're kind of averaging
all the data as opposed to a stereo image,
which is two cameras here. You might have 200
images. And one of the examples of now the
downside of structural emotions that processing time it can take
. You can take 12 hours, a lot of
images. Um but some of the neat things you
can do with it are anomaly detection. So in
this case we flew over an area uh imaged it
and flew back over it with a couple of piles
of gravel created and and could clearly point those out
. Um either stereo or structure from motion. We
use both techniques to get the three D. Terrain
and we've used that now recently for classification. Okay
, so two D. And three D. Classification
is a good way to begin to intelligently look at
your scenes and gain knowledge from them. And we're
looking at a post storm damage. The National Weather
service in town here is interested in classifying uh wind
speed. Doppler Doppler measured wind speed with damage on
the ground. So we're looking at classifying the damage
on the ground using um our methods of training and
classification in these environments. So using conditional random fields
is now kind of the direction we're going in where
we will take a three D. Scene as you
see here on the upper left. And then after
training the data again using conditional random fields were able
to very easily identified vehicles, telephone poles, power
lines, buildings. So imagine taking that into a
post disaster area and quickly identifying which buildings have been
destroyed, which roads have been disrupted, which ecosystems
are affected. Okay, so we're very, very
excited about using R. Two D. And three
D. Classification of this radiation detection methods are another
thing that we've done here. We've done aerial radiation
scans and then we put together this really cool system
based on a on the Yamaha R. Max and
a a ground robot that gets tether deployed from the
helicopter and it will touch down on the ground and
it will allow us to pick up physical samples which
then can be flown home for analysis. And I
am going to go through a three minute video and
that is it. I know we're running late.
Um but it's a pretty it's a pretty fun thing
to watch. So again, this is the Yamaha
R. Max. It's a£200 helicopter that carries
about a£50 payload. We use lab view pretty
heavily at the lab to operate our payloads and we
have this mobile ground control station that the operations are
conducted from. This is out of the wind farms
. We have 1700 acres of Of agricultural land out
there. We also have a 300 ft by 70-foot
runway that we fly off of. And we have
all of our, most of our certificates of authorization
are based at the accounting firm facility. And so
what we typically do is take off the pilot on
the, on the left, there is, is
under manual control, he's going to get the helicopter
up to a safe altitude and when everything is okay
and everybody's comfortable with it gets flipped over into autonomous
mode and you'll see it, it'll really stabilize out
. It will become very stable and locked into a
GPS coordinates, uh, and will not move.
And at that point then we can, we can
deploy the ground robot which is going to come down
to the ground and then pick up some samples for
us. So the helicopter is part essentially in space
. Um If if we had continued funding for this
project, we would put a vision system on the
helicopter and allowed to track the ground robot as it
moves around on the ground. But for this experiment
, it's going to stay in one position and the
robots not going to go too far. Now,
the winch, it has two modes of operation.
It'll drop the robot down to the ground once it
hits the ground, the winch control system will kick
in and it will maintain a small amount of tension
on the line so it doesn't get tangled up in
the trays. And the robot now can be driven
. You can tell he operated from the truck using
the camera on board the robot pants, There's a
pan tilt zoom camera on the robot and so we'll
go to a robot view right here. So this
is what the people inside the ground control station see
. Um And again the tether stays attached to the
helicopter the whole time. So it, yeah when
the if we had a payload on the robot to
collect samples that could collect samples at this point and
then once they're collected the robot is retracted backup helicopters
you'll see it go off the ground. At that
point I will go ahead and ramp up this presentation
so you.