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AT 309 - Flight Lab 5

Flight log:

9/30/25 DJI Matrice 300 SATT D at Purdue Turf Farm with Joe, Jacob, Isabella, Nick, Hailey, Mason, and Dr. Hupy. 1.0 total time with all being as Sensor Operator.

Preflight:

We spent the first few minutes of lab time in NISW 145, The Computer Lab, to learn how to create a map and fly it. During this time Dr. Hupy showed us how to create a map in Google Map and later export it on a M300 ground control station so the drone can fly it without human intervention. During this time, he also stated that we will all be working together because there are not enough M300 to ensure every group had its own mapping mission.

We also conducted an actual preflight while we were at the turf farm. This portion of the preflight included checking the weather, the winds were calm and the sky was clear. Another big part of our preflight was to get LAANCE as we were flying in controlled airspace. We also used a checklist provided by the UAS Dispatch which included checking the arm for the M300, ensuring the gimble was properly secured, turning on the strobe lights, and checking if the props were free of any nicks.

Test procedure:

After learning how to create a mapping mission, we drove to the Purdue Turf Farm and began preparing for our flight though we quickly ran into an issue. For the first ten minutes, the drone would not take off due to a hardware problem. Dr. Hupy and Jacob worked together to troubleshoot, and while I am not entirely sure what they did, they were eventually able to resolve the issue and get the aircraft airborne. Once operational, we set the drone to fly in a lawnmower pattern with 90% lateral and frontal overlap, and the gimbal was positioned at nadir to capture precise, consistent imagery. To ensure operational safety, especially since there were training activities happening at the turf farm, the rest of the team acted as visual observers (VOs) to maintain situational awareness, ensuring the drone did not overfly people or vehicles. Additionally, we utilized RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) corrections, which greatly improved the mission by providing higher positional accuracy and more reliable geotagged imagery, reducing potential error in the final mapping product.

Photos:

Do not have any photos as Dr. Hupy said he was going to teach us how to extract the photos in class (10/3/25).

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