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Little flying machine is new research tool for UGA scientitsts

A new University of Georgia research tool gave visitors to the State Botanical Garden of Georgia an unexpected show recently as it hovered high above now-bare flowerbeds in late February.

It was a quadcopter, a little flying machine propelled and lifted by four rotors controlled by UGA student Corbin Kling on the ground below.

About 14 inches across and weighing a little more than a pineapple with its high-definition video camera, it’s what some people might call a drone.

But the device that buzzed over the Botanical Garden is really more like a radio-controlled model plane, said Tommy Jordan, associate director of UGA’s Center for Geospatial Research.

The word “drone” nowadays carries military and police associations, but what the UGA scientists have in mind for the quadcopter are things like monitoring marsh health and the progress of butterfly gardens on the Georgia coast.

“It’s an aerial camera platform for us,” Jordan said.

For years, the center’s research has used satellite data, geographic information systems (GIS) and other kinds of data on such projects as mapping algal blooms, tracking the spread of wildlife diseases and the impact of off-road vehicle trails on Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve.

But the little DJI Phantom 2 Vision quadcopter and its camera will open up a whole new window onto the ground below, said Marguerite Madden, director of the Center for Geospatial Research.

“For us it’s unique information from just over the canopy that we’ve never had,” Madden said.

“We can get two-inch pixels instead of two-foot pixels,” Jordan said.

Aerial photography can get close images, but it’s expensive, Madden added.

On the other hand, the entire cost of the quadcopter rig is less than $2,000, including the $1,200 flying camera and controller plus an iPad and some software.

Madden and Jordan were practicing using the Phantom over the State Botanical Garden in late February, along with post-doctoral researcher David Cotten and Kling, a UGA undergraduate geology major working in the center.

Kling got to fly the quadcopter because he’s had experience — he operates an indoor blimp for an advertiser during Atlanta Hawks basketball games in Philips Arena.

Last week Jordan and Madden took the quadcopter down to the Georgia coast, where its real work is beginning.

The remotely piloted vehicle, or RPV, is actually owned by the Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History. Its first uses will relate to the research of scientists with the institute, an interdisciplinary group of ecologists, geographers, historians and other researchers, all with the goal of conserving, documenting and studying the human and natural history of the historic Wormsloe property near Savannah.

Wormsloe Plantation, on the Isle of Hope, is an historic area of about 1,000 acres dating back to the 1730s. The Barrow family that owned it turned much of the property over to the state in 1973, and now the Wormsloe Historic Site is a part of the state park system.

The Wormsloe Foundation recently deeded about 15.5 more acres of family property to UGA, which is beginning to use the land for research and teaching.

Two early projects will be tracking the progress of experimental butterfly gardens there and monitoring the health and growth of salt marsh on the Wormsloe property, Madden said.

Using an imaging technique called Structure from Motion, or SfM, the scientists will be able to build 3-D models of the marsh and butterfly gardens, Jordan said.

But they’re seeing more and more ways they might use the flying camera, such as “ground-truthing” satellite data used to map vegetation, making sure their interpretations jibe with what’s actually on the ground.

“It gives us a perspective that we have never seen before,” Madden said.

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