Lesson 8 Introduction

Welcome to Lesson 8! In this lesson, you will become familiar with the different applications that the UAS is utilized for. The list of commercial and civilian applications is increasing by the day. It is difficult, if it is not impossible, to nail down such a list. The low cost and easy deployment of the UAS encouraged many people to utilize the unmanned aircraft to replace manned aircraft for their activities. Users are discovering new applications every day; however, we will only cover in this lesson the most obvious one. We will not cover the military application, as it is obvious, but we will consider, for the purpose of this lesson, the security and surveillance use of UAS as a civilian/commercial application since some of such services are offered commercially. Much of the commercial and scientific use of UAS that concerns us is in the field of geospatial data acquisition for remote sensing activities. The term “geospatial data” refers to any dataset that is referenced spatially (i.e., geolocated or geo-referenced) with known coordinates systems and datum. I expect from you in this lesson to read chapter 6 of the textbook Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems and several external readings I will point out in the lesson notes.

Lesson Objectives

At the successful completion of this lesson, you should be able to:

• recognize different applications of the UAS for civilian use;
• understand how the UAS data is used for different applications;
• compose a list of additional applications that can be served by UAS.

Lesson Readings

• Chapter 4 (UAS Sensing: Theory and Practice) of textbook 1, 2nd edition: Barnhart, et al., Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems
• Chapter 20 of textbook 3: Wolf, et al., Elements of Photogrammetry with Applications in GIS
• Gahran, A. “Fighting fire with data, spacecraft, drones"
• Chao, H., et al., "AggieAir: Towards Low-cost Cooperative Multispectral Remote Sensing Using Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems"
• Read the dronenodes.com article Commercial Drone Applications On The Rise | Enerprise UAV Solutions | 2018
• Read the lecture slides on Digital Image Classification

Lesson Activities

• Watch the webinar: " Applying Drones to Surveying and Engineering Projects Today."
• Complete Lesson 8 Quiz.
• Submit your results for exercise 2 data processing in Pix4D.
• Submit your COA Application.