Our first drone survey

Our journey begins at Panipath – Ambala highways. Since this was first project therefore we were excited as well as skeptical. Excitement was to prove our self and get some big project. While we were skeptical about the scope and success of the project there was also some ambiguity about the exact location and local police permission to conduct the aerial survey. Finally we put our scientism to rest. Our complete team got into action carrying the entire technical requirement along with them .We reached one night ahead and got accommodated. Next day, we all woke up with our checklist. Weather was good, batteries were charged, everything was set except local police confirmation. The first half of the day was spent on the police permission and collecting project scope with PIU/RO. After understanding the scope with the local assistance provided by NHAI we finally reached the “Point” from where we had to start. The work assigned to us was to capture 50 kilometer aerial videography as well as aerial mapping for demo, so we had to fly two separate missions for this. We were the team of four people, enough to fly two UAV’s, therefore we decided to take both data simultaneously. We planned the mission and the drone took off.  We discovered that drones, after sometime, halts going forward. The drones were called back and a new mission was planned. But the problem persisted and the drones stopped once again at the same point. We checked everything like battery level, controller, antenna, internet connection, sensors but got nothing. After approximately 30 minutes of brainstorming on project site we finally made out that the road was not a fly zone because of the nearby Air Force station.We got that there is an air force station near the road that is “No fly zone “. We already had these points in the checklist but we missed to check that point. We contacted the PIU Ambala and requested new points for the survey. Our new point of start was next to no flying zone and in the opposite direction. We just started and the weather that was antiquating for us changed, a cold wind started with sign of heavy rain, and we got down our drones. It rained for about 2 hours. We had lunch and waited for the rain to stop. About 3 the weather favored us again. We started again and covered the required area. First part of the survey was completed, for some reason we were unable to take the complete data from the survey site from that day, we therefore flew some more missions the next day to cover the point of interest. Everything was good from our end. We started our image processing for orthomosaic and found some images were missing from the point of interest so next day we took imagery from that particular area and completed the project.