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Week 7: GCP Assignment
10/20/2025
For this week’s assignment, we saw a departure from the norm. Instead of a flight mission, this lab was used to practice working with ground control points and associated technology relating to them. This was a longer assignment in the field, but it was a quicker assignment to explain. This lab was conducted with the use of ESRI software, and it was used in coordination with Arc GIS Earth. Some of the work was completed on mobile cell phones while some was completed back in the computer lab in the NISW building. This building would become more and more crucial to this course as the semester went on. Overall, the message of the assignment was to understand GCPs, how they make UAS data more accurate, and how to compare locations with the use of the GCPs.
After creating a project in Arc GIS Earth, several layers were created for this lab on the ground of the Purdue Turf Farm. The layers would define proposed mission boundaries, GCP points, and later the actual recorded coordinates of the GCP locations. Figure 1 below shows the combination of all layers of the project, and further below, Figure 2 shows the isolated proposed GCPs layer of the project. These layers would be used inconjuction with each other to fly a mission in the real world, but a mission was never flown with this project in this course.
Figure 1: GCPs project overview
Figure 2: GCP layer
There were many parameters to understand in this lab assignment project, and most of the issues that operators have can be remedied by understanding the fine details. One area of interest was the dowmain page in the computer project, which can be seen below in Figure 3. This page is sort of the switch board of the project, and it shows what items have which names in the grand scheme of things. This is where an operator can identify and label the various objects and layers they wish to display, and this is where we identified the difference between GCP types.
Figure 3: Domain page
After the interior work was complete on this project, it became time to engage in the field exercise. This was accomplished by going physically out to the study area and using the ESRI field maps software to record images and coordinates of the points as they existed in real life. This caused some issues because of our proximity to golfers in the driving range, but I figured my work mattered more than the risk of getting clobbered by a golf ball, so I went for it. Figure 4 below shows an image of what one of these areas looked like, and there were ten in total. There was also a set of coordinates associated with each image, and these coordinate points could then be used to get real and serious GCPs in place. These GCPs could then be used in order to correct UAS data, which would be an incredible technology to use in industry. This lab assignment was very technical, but it will become very useful knowledge to have in the real world. A full products report is available upon request.
Figure 4: Example image of GCP
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