Course Description

A hands-on course that will prepare students to become certified drone pilots and allow them to apply best practices for quality data acquisition, image processing, and data extraction. Topics covered include overview of material for the FAA Part 107 test, UAV image stitching, and processing with Pix4D and ArcMap.

Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be required to read recent papers in the use of UAV technology in agriculture and write either a review paper or a grant proposal on a topic related to UAV applications chosen by the student and approved by the instructor. Students can select one of the two options as a term paper. The term paper is an opportunity for students to demonstrate critical thinking skills, understand scientific papers, and to develop skills in scientific writing.

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Athena Title

UAV Technology Crop Sciences

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Prerequisite

BIOL 1103 or BIOL 1103E or BIOL 2103H or BIOL 2103S or BIOL 1107 or BIOL 1107E or BIOL 2107H or PBIO 1210 or permission of department

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Semester Course Offered

Offered fall

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Grading System

A - F (Traditional)

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Student learning Outcomes

• Students will operate UAVs, plan flight missions and follow the FAA regulations for safe and legal procedures.
• Students will perform image stitching and processing procedures for multiple types of sensors as they manipulate and work with computational procedures, graphical and numerical data formats when stitching and processing various types of images.
• Students will select the most appropriate UAV, and sensor types to evaluate and identify different crop spectral responses to stress.

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Topical Outline

• 1. Introduction to UAV remote sensing
• 2. FAA Part 107 study guide
• 3. Hardware and software
• 4. Flight Planning
• 5. Bets practices for UAV data acquisition - Multispectral, thermal and RGB
• 6. Overview of image stitching software (Pix4D)
• 7. Image stitching process (multispectral, thermal, and RGB images)
• 8. Merging flights
• 9. Creating 3D models, and animations
• 10. Reflectance map processing and data extraction (ArcMap)
• 11. ArcMap model builder

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Institutional Competencies Learning Outcomes

Analytical Thinking

The ability to reason, interpret, analyze, and solve problems from a wide array of authentic contexts.

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Syllabus

Select Faculty / Instructor to download syllabus:   Nunes Lacerda, Lorena

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Public CV

Select a file to download:   Lacerda_CV.pdf

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