UAV archaeological fieldwork

Joined
Jul 28, 2014
Messages
22
Reaction score
1
Hi all,
Have followed this board for a while and it's provided some great tips and insight. My small lab, based at an American university, purchased a Phantom 2 and GoPro last May so that I could bring it to Italy and use it for aerial photography, video, and photogrammetry of an archaeological excavation I'm working on. We went with the Phantom/GoPro combo over other UAVs because of the flexibility (photo, video, timelapse, etc..) and apparent ease-of-use (which turned out to be true).

This was the first quadcopter I'd ever flown, although I'm an avid videogamer and have flown RC planes and RC cars before, and I definitely think all of those translate over to flying the Phantom. I also had about a week to practice in open fields before diving in to the actual work.

I flew the Phantom over the site every day for a month, usually 4-5 flights per day, and it performed flawlessly.

Anyway: on to some of the eye-candy....
1) A still from one of the flights over the "Porta Romana", one of the city gates (This flight I took about 900 photos)
G0011519.JPG


2)Some screen-captures of the Photogrammetry model made from those photos:
PR_1.jpg

PR_2.jpg


3)Out over the Tyrrhenian Sea, getting some shots of the ancient port of the city:
port2.jpg


4)The most picturesque ruin on the site: The high-point or acropolis
Arx2_34view.jpg

Arx1_straighton.jpg


5) The site of the current excavations, a Bath Complex
aerialOverview1.jpg


In short, the Phantom was integral to getting a number of shots and views of the site that would have otherwise been impossible or very expensive to achieve, and without being able to browse this forum I probably would have been in way over my head. So, Thank you to DJI and thanks to the community here! Hopefully this was interesting - I think UAVs have a great future in real-world application outside of hobby and simple aerial cinematography/photography.
 

Recent Posts

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
143,086
Messages
1,467,528
Members
104,965
Latest member
Fimaj