Day 2 saw us undertaking an Introduction to flight planning and mission monitoring. The software provided to do this, and indeed the whole approach, seemed quite intuitive and very flexible. We also spent some time go through the base checks and preparation of our UAV for flying. All of this combined to give us increased confidence in what we hope to do in Svalbard.
In the afternoon, we made an other attempt at test flying, but the weather conditions were far from suitable, so we had to abort. The only thing to do under those conditions is to seek shelter in a local cafe for coffee and cake – very good it was too!
Into the evening, we begun to think about how to organise the flying we want to do in Svalbard on Midre Lovénbreen. Our biggest issues are to do with landing (i.e. finding terrain that is suitable to land on without damaging our UAV) and to do with wind. Wind is, of course a big issue when it comes to all aspects of our flight, and we do face some potentially tricky conditions when in Svalbard. To tackle this, we spent some time with Nigel and the QuestUAV team, constructing a model of the glacier (not to scale!) in their offices (see picture!). Building a glacier model out of jackets, a dog blanket and boxes seemed like an curious approach to start with, but it actually ended up being a really useful tool for working out what sort of conditions we might face. It led to a lengthy discussion about wind strengths, direction, flight planning, options. However, you be the judge of how accurately we represented the glacier…
Interestingly we took height data off Google Earth and built our model with that. Now looking at the pictures to the right, it’s clear that the real world site has much more dramatic surroundings than our Google model. Still some work to do.
Mapping the Midtre Lovénbreen in 3D with Fixed Wing UAV 