GCP instruction at Purdue Wildlife

05/14/2019

Since it was a beautiful day we took the students out to the Purdue Wildlife Area (PWA) and flew the Mavic to introduce Ground Control Points (GCPs) to students. GCPs are used as known "waypoints" in survey and structure from motion mapping. When creating structure from motion point clouds and maps from UAS flights the software will be told where these points are. This knowledge will reduce the amount of guessing that the software has to do in order to correctly match images for the point clouds. We brought two kinds of GCPs for demonstrations. Aeropoints, figure 1, and manual GCPs, figure 2.

Figure 1: Aeropoint

Figure 2: Manual GCP

The Aeropoints will collect GPS location, and create their own type of location network autonomously. The manual GCPs need some additional work. For the manual points a survey GPS is needed, and figure 3 shows Dr. Hupy instructing students on this process.

Figure 3: Manual GPS location instruction

Once students had been instructed on the purpose for GCPs, and how to manually create them, they were sent into the field to distribute them in the target area. After the GCPs had been distributed I sent the students out into the target area to hide. I'll be using the data we collected from this flight for more Loc8 work in the near future.