Simon Lovely: Aeronautical Engineering and Unmanned Aerial Systems: Week Four

This week was exciting in preparing and traveling for going to Alamosa. CloudMap has been a great experience so far and the long days and flying has been great so far. We started out the week in Stillwater still where we started getting the weather stations that would be on the ground so we can record weather data that happens on the ground, which is what we would be in charge of when we are doing research.

At CloudMap, Saturday was a Media Day where groups from the local farm community and groups from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) where we would explain to them what we would be doing throughout the week. A lot of people came to see the vehicles at Leach Airport which is north of Alamosa. Below are some photos of the stand that we had where we worked on all the UAV’s which flew that afternoon. This day was also where we can bring the UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and calibrate them so that they would be measuring correctly. We would take a UAV and fly it up against a van which had a 50 foot mast on it where it measured many different variables. It would measure wind direction, wind speed, humidity and dew point etc. We took the data from the UAV’s and compared it to the ones from the weather station on the van, and we calibrated the drones to match the weather station. They let me fly a few UAV’s since I have my Remote Pilot Certification. This took a lot of my afternoon.

The next day consisted of doing research for winds and verifying that everything would work for the next week. We flew all the aircraft except for the fixed wing aircraft. We set up almost in the middle of nowhere where we would launch aircraft and test them to make sure that the aircraft were fit to fly, and that the automation that some of the aircraft had would work and function properly. There were two main drones that we flew this day and those were the DJI M600 Hexacopter and a lot of the 3DR Solo Quadcopter. The M600 Hexacopter had an anemometer (measures wind speed and direction), an iMet sensor (measures humidity and pressure) and a dropsonde (measures humidity and temperature). The Solo quadcopters only had a dropsonde on them and a couple were switched out for an anemometer.

Otherwise that was it and was my week here. The rest of the days I haven’t discussed were mainly days where the other interns and I were packing up supplies for the trip to Alamosa and there was a travel day. I am looking forward to my next week here in Alamosa as there will be some great research with drones and fixed wing UAV’s.