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.
Athena Title
UAV Technology Crop Sciences
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
1. Prepare students to become a certified drone pilot; 2. Identify best practices for drone image acquisition for the main sensors used in crop sciences; 3. Perform image radiometric and geographic calibration, image stitching and data analysis using Pix4D and ArcMap.
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
Syllabus