-: It's a pleasure to be here.
It's an honor to be able to speak to you
as a newer faculty member,
and talk about what I'm doing
in the Turfgrass Program here at UNL.
And Rock and Richard asked
if I would talk a little bit about my experience
using unmanned aerial systems,
UAS, as it's more officially described by the FAA.
Most people call them drones.
So, I thought I'd do the presentation first.
But, you know, since it's lunch,
maybe to get everybody into it,
well, we'll fly around first with the drone.
Then I can talk about it a little bit.
So, if you turn your attention
to this table in the front here,
we'll try this out.
It's a little bit difficult.
This drone is designed to fly
with the help of GPS.
So, when it's outside, you'd put it up in the air,
it wants to stay within a box
that's about three feet square
and about 1 1/2 foot tall.
So, it's gonna fight to hold that position
as much as possible.
We're inside, so I don't have the luxury of GPS.
So I actually have to use a little bit of flying skill
to fly the drone over here.
So, well, we'll get started.
(drone whirring)
Voiceover: Takeoff.
(drone buzzing)
-: So, it's still a pretty stable platform.
This is a DJI, Phantom 3.
And, I'm kinda panning, saying hello to everybody.
I'll take a video here, so they can record this.
I can pan the camera down a little bit.
This drone is pretty simplistic. (laughs)
Right over Cara.
I'm sorry, I'll back it towards me a little bit.
Blowing everything out of the way.
This has a visual camera on it.
But we use it for our turf research and extension,
a fair amount.
So you can see, it's inside.
It's kinda drifting a little bit
due to that lack of that GPS signal.
So I actually do have to fly it.
If it was outside,
it would wanna try to hold that
specific location that it's at.
So, do some very slow flying here.
(drone buzzing)
Say, "Hi," Kim.
No trees to crash into today,
just walls.
And I'll land it here.
(drone buzzing)
(drone whirring)
So, a little harder to fly inside, that's for sure.
But,
(audience clapping)
we'll turn it off.
(audience clapping)
So, how are we using this?
Is this just a toy?
Or is it actually something that, you know,
we can use in our research to become topical
with our agronomy and horticultural research?
And so, you know, they can come in a variety of sizes.
You can have your Predators, the military uses here.
They're very large systems.
It's unmanned, it's controlled by a pilot,
and has a lot of computer assistance going on there
so we can safely fly it.
Even mine, you know, a computer pretty much flies it.
I can see what it sees
with the 720p downlink
to my iPad here.
But, pretty much,
the GPS and the computer wanna keep it flying.
And it really is,
if I want it to go forward, I push forward.
Should we let go, it wants to hold that spot.
So it's pretty simplistic.
Then there's bigger drones.
Dr. Ferguson's lab uses larger ones.
They have, you know, four or eight rotors.
They can have a bigger payload.
And they can have a lot of different sensors on them,
hyperspectral-type of equipment,
infrared to surface temperatures,
as a whole myriad of uses for these type of products.
And then I have mine.
It's just a Phantom 3.
It's kind of a, it's kinda in between a, you know,
hobby and professional grade.
It has a 1080p camera on it.
And so it still gets really, really good,
high-quality photos and videos.
It's very stable gimbal.
And so, you would know,
there's a couple different groups
using these type of technologies.
There's the NIMBUS Lab.
And their whole goal is to develop these UAS systems
to actually do more than just take pictures.
And so they're looking at ways of, you know,
taking water samples in remote locations.
And now working with Dirac Twidwell,
from our department,
to see if they can even do controlled burns
with these type of technologies.
And maybe he'll talk about that here shortly.
And then, there's also different types
of visual images of a farm field here,
to try to assess water and nutrient, pest status.
And so that's kind of different ways that they were used.
In our Turf Program,
we do a lot of just the more visual stuff.
Although we're switching into looking at temperatures, too,
as a way of estimating instantaneous ET rate.
And so, we're gonna try to incorporate that in future years.
But, you know, part of Dr. Keenan Amundsen's work
is looking at Buffalograss green-up
from different Buffalograss sessions.
Richard Ferguson is helping with these drone images,
and, you know, just looking at
what grasses are greening up faster,
and documenting that green-up with software.
And then, you know, figuring out, making selections
based on what greens up earliest
and then what goes dormant latest.
We use it for fertility research.
So you can see different fertilizer treatments
on this turfgrass.
The controls stand out very, you know, very obviously there.
And aside from these pictures,
we can even take pictures frequently
and then turn them into time lapse of videos.
So we can give that to a group for extension,
and show how a turf fertilizer
moves controlled-release end product,
how that release changes over the course of a year,
through a time lapse,
instead of just figures with, you know,
visual quality ratings.
This is some Tall Fescue drought research,
where we had a rainout shelter puts over this plot,
so it doesn't get irrigated by rainfall,
just by our inputs of water.
And we can see, you know, plots that weren't watered
versus plots that were well-watered.
Just another way to kind of
rate and watch how that turfgrass dries down.
Again, this is part as much for research
as is for extension.
You can talk and talk and talk about how to water,
but if you can show somebody a YouTube video
showing how Tall Fescue lawn
dries down with different irrigation,
that's more powerful than a figure's ever gonna be.
All right, here's another picture, too,
of other products we researched.
You know, some colorants and different fungicide products,
different drought strategies, shade structures.
And so the drone
gets us that better bird's-eye perspective.
We also are using it, too, as a kind of a plug
for our new research center we're putting on East Campus,
'cause some plots out there.
And so, we're just using that to scout for disease,
scout for anything, irregularities in the plots,
and then, you know, document the establishment
of this new area.
And so we started last year, in 2014,
with a great donation from the department,
to develop one acre of turf plots on East Campus.
And so, here's a picture of that from our UAV, UAS.
And then, this Fall, we expanded that into two more acres.
So now I have three acres to do my research,
because the water quality at our Mead site
is starting to get pretty poor with nitrates,
which really hampers my fertility and water research.
So, this is kind of what a video looks like.
It's been a little bit compressed,
but it does shoot in 1080p.
And see, you can kinda get a sense of, you know,
the stability that this system offers.
Even for video, the gimbal's really good.
I can fly it around.
The gimbal tries to hold that position, that camera,
nice and steady.
And we can get great video.
As Rock said,
"It looks like a camera on a wire, it's so smooth."
Which I tend to agree.
So, it's pretty cool technology.
We're using it across this department.
And this is just one of the ways
that our Turfgrass Program is using this technology.
So, I think that's all I have.
Does anybody have any questions about the technology?
Otherwise, we can do it later
during the Question and Answer Session.
All right.
Voiceover: Fly time?
-: Fly time, on this, is about 20 minutes.
Yep, so.
All right, thank you.
Voiceover: Great, thanks a lot.
(audience clapping)