Drones and GIS

In preparation for the 2020 Creation Celebration, I was asked to make an aerial map of a corner of the SBA property by the Director of Outdoor Education, Coach Rogers.

SOAR, Silverdale's Outdoor Ed organization, needed this map because they wanted to know how to use their space effectively for Creation Celebration. It was important for them to have a way to organize all the vendors that were coming to the event. They were interested in the idea of having a map of the event that attendees could access from any device to help them better experience the event.

I was very interested to hear about this problem. I have been personally fascinated by flight and drone technology for years and wanted to learn to use these tools to create a meaningful product.

From the conversation I had with him, I got the idea to do more than just an aerial map, but to make my senior capstone project based around learning about mechatronics engineering, computer science, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to help Silverdale. I set out to make an aerial map of campus, an intuitive website that helps organize and direct the 2020 Creation Celebration, and a map that helps teachers more easily reserve outdoor classrooms.

Last December I passed my FAA Part 107 exam, making it legal for me to operate unmanned aircraft for organizations professionally. This UAV pilots license was not absolutely needed for this project but something that is very handy to have and I will be using a lot in the future. I purchased a DJI phantom 3 SE from a friend of mine for use in this project as well as other projects in the future. It is capable of high quality still images as well as video but most importantly, it can fly autonomous missions and take photos with embedded GPS coordinates. I learned to use this feature to get hundreds of photos of the school from the air.

Through the help of the tech department at Silverdale, I was able to get an ESRI account for the school and the software I would need to make maps. ESRI is a company that is at the forefront of GIS and has led and progressed the field for many years. I used their ArcGIS Pro to make most of my maps, and I learned to use it to make orthographic maps. Orthographic maps are images that are made up of many other smaller images to make one large image or in this case, map. I took the hundreds of images I had taken from my drone and made one large map from them. The process is not perfect, but after 3 different flight attempts and maps, I took away a good map. I still needed to make a map of the entirety of campus and not just half of it, but the COVID-19 situation made going to Silverdale an impossibility to make more aerial maps. I had to make the most with what I had.

This is the variety of products that ESRI offers. All of them are free to use for schools and are all connected to a web platform called ArcGIS Online. Silverdale Baptist Academy has now acquired this platform of tools for teacher and student use. I will use several different products throughout my project but all will be linked to each other and accessible through the web.

This is an excellent resource that showed me how to use ArcGIS Pro to make an orthomosaic map from drone images.

With a little bit of experience with ArcGIS Pro making the ortho maps, I began to make data layers. This is the most time consuming but also the most important part of GIS work. All the information needed must be gathered and organized in a way that the software can recognize and retrieve the information.

The first part of any web map is creating a base imagery layer. I wanted to use my drone map as my imagery layer but I was yet to make a drone map that was of the entirety of campus. The satellite imagery that ArcGIS Pro has standard when making maps was not good enough for me to use, so I found a high definition Hamilton County map that was made by someone taking pictures from an airplane back in 2018. This was significantly better that the satellite imagery, but I fully intended on adding in the drone map once I had one that I thought to be sufficient.

I continued to build my map of campus by creating zones based on how the classroom areas had been organized in the data I was given by the Outdoor Ed team. I created a polygon to represent each zone based on this image and gave it attributes based on the data from the Outdoor Ed team.

I met with Coach Rogers to discuss placement of Creation Celebration vendors on the map, and he shared a spreadsheet with me that had all the vendors divided by theme. He instructed me to put them anywhere that made sense, except I couldn't put anything in zones 1-6, 11, and 19-20.

The next part of the development of the creation celebration map was the creation of new data. This means taking the information I have access to in the spreadsheet and incorporating it into the map based on field observation. I used an ESRI tool called Survey 123 to do this. I made a survey with questions relating to the data I needed to collect and linked it to the map I made. During class one day, I went out to the zones with my phone and stood at each spot I thought would be a good place to put each vendor/activity. The GPS on my phone would record my location into Survey 123 up to just a few feet. Now that's precision!

This sounds complicated but really all it means is uploading the map I made onto the web so it could be used by other online applications. With my web map published, I tried to share it with my robotics teacher, but I realized he couldn't access it because I needed to update the sharing permissions first. That is the beauty of a web map; it can accessible to only me, the organization (SBA), or everyone. This means I can make a copy of a web map that only the organization has access to and the original everyone has access to, but only the web map that the organization has access to can edit the map, while the other web map that everyone has access to cannot be edited. I did this so that for future Creation Celebrations, Silverdale can just edit the names of the vendors/exhibits and move them to new locations on campus without messing up anything built from the map.

With the completion of my web map, I was able to begin experimenting with a new ESRI software called Experience Builder. Experience Builder provides a product that can be shared and viewed across any device. This is perfect for my purposes; I can design a user friendly map that can be accessed by a link from a phone, tablet, or computer.

In my attempts to understand how to best use this software, I found a YouTube video that helped out a ton:

It took a few hours to get my first draft of my website working the way I wanted to but I was very happy with what I had made. It was only the first version but I learned how to use widgets and the importance of making something that runs well on a phone, laptop, and tablet.

I followed the same steps as I did with the Creation Celebration map but I applied it to outdoor classrooms. The Outdoor Ed team provided me information regarding their outdoor reservation system already, so I just had to enter in the data. They run off of an interconnected google system for reserving classroom spaces, so when a teacher needs supplies or assistance, they fill out a google form which sets up reminders in the Outdoor Ed team's calendar. I did not want to mess this system up, so I just implemented their system into my own.

This Outdoor Classroom Reservation map is put together in the same way as the Creation Celebration map but it is made highlighting different elements. Experience Builder is a truly wonderful tool that makes something like this very easy once you put the time in to learn how to do it right.

Just like in the engineering design process, the final step of any project is to share it! I hope you like what I made and will be able to use it this coming fall for the rescheduled Creation Celebration

Scan the QR code or click the button below to visit my map for the Creation Celebration Map...

This has been a very challenging but extremely rewarding project. I stepped out of my comfort zone to try and create a useful product in an area I am not very experienced in. I love getting to use my passion for drones and flight by incorporating aerial images into a map. It was also the perfect excuse to buy myself a DJI drone. Making maps is not easy, and the importance of the process required to do it cannot be underestimated. It took much perseverance and determination to get through the tedious elements but the end result was well worth the journey to get there.

I learned that GIS, or Geographical Information Services, is not just a way to map problems, it is an intelligent system that can integrate data from many sources. It can learn through AI and apply that knowledge in logical ways. In many ways GIS is the future, because it links every aspect of our lives in ways we have no clue about until you can see behind the scenes. Every road, traffic light, school bus route, wildlife protection agency, political polling institution, sales of every kind, air traffic, pollution, and emergency response is mapped using GIS. It makes data more intelligent and therefore more efficient and effective by integrating vast amounts of information in ways never before seen. I used GIS to link the images my drone took, the data I received from the Outdoor Ed department, and the software ESRI provides to make applications that are practical and solve problems. In my case, I solved the problem of SOAR, Silverdale's Outdoor Ed organization, needing a way to organize vendors and exhibit locations.

From the experience of using the applications and tools developed by ESRI, I learned about computer science and the importance of making something user friendly. I saw many examples of great user interfaces and poor user interfaces and I learned what separates them from each other. To make an effective website or application, you need to make sure it is in a layout that is intuitive, and can be accessed from any device. Several times during my prototyping process I found that I had spent so much time focusing on the website for a computer, that I forgot that the cool feature I had implemented might not work on a phone. I am not very good at coding yet, but by using applications that others have coded gives me an appreciation for how they were made and the purpose they serve. Computer science is essentially the "how" of any tech project, and in my case, its principle was how I made an intuitive website that worked on any device.

Last but not least, I learned that mechatronics engineering comes from a need for engineers to have interdisciplinary knowledge. It's spirit is in the idea that a more well-rounded engineer is capable of doing a job better and more efficiently than an engineer focused on a single field of engineering. I have definitely become more of a well rounded maker and engineer thanks to this project. I plan on majoring in this field of engineering at MTSU this coming fall and would like to pursue a career in making creative and useful products that can help people. Ideally, I would like to work more on the hardware side of engineering than software, but I know for sure I want a job that incorporates both such as building robots or drones. The understanding of the software is critical for any good mechatronics engineer, and the experience I have gained from this project has greatly helped me in that regard.

This process has taught me a lot about the fields of mechatronics engineering, Computer Science, and GIS, but more importantly I have learned how they apply to everyday life. You cannot have aerial maps, or even satellite maps, without an engineer to design a device capable of taking pictures remotely, or an engineer to make a device capable of carrying a camera in the air or putting a satellite into space. Almost everything in this world is no longer purely mechanical, but a combination of mechanics, electrics, and software, however sophisticated or simple it may be. I never realized how big a role GIS plays in everyday life. It links data from everywhere in the world and can direct it in positive and helpful ways. Take the Covid-19 pandemic for example; GIS is being used to identify disease hot spots in states and cities, predict where the disease will be next, organize healthcare workers and send medical help to towns in the most effective way possible, to efficiently distribute tests, simulate length and spread of the disease, and how to best distribute a cure if one is found to exist. Geographical Information Systems links everything and everyone in a data driven world.

For those who don't know what the engineering design process it, here it is in a nutshell:

1. Do Research/Collect Data on Problem
2. Brainstorm Possible Solutions
3. Make Prototype
4. Refine Prototype
5. Create Finished Product
6. Share

Before I wrote my proposal, I did research into what my capstone project should be. I looked into GIS and what it would take to do this project. Then, I brainstormed ideas on potential solutions. Once I found a solution that I thought I could do (the website), I went back to the first step to collect all the data that I would need to make the website. Before I could make a prototype of a website, first I had to make a prototype of a drone imagery base map, then of a web map, and then I could start a prototype of a website. I used step 4 and 5, making and refining the prototype, many times during this project. On average I would have to make 3 prototypes of a map before I could go on to the next level. On the final level, the level of making the interactive website, I made 2 prototypes before making the final version. The final product did not take very long to make as by then I was much better at using the ESRI software. Once I had completed it, I shared it with myself and my family first to test it worked well on their devices and did not require a sign-in to access. Then, I shared it with my capstone instructor and SOAR.

Covid-19 really was the largest challenge to this project. I had planned to do numerous flights over campus with my drone but only was able to do three due to terrible weather, and when the weather began to clear up, the cancellation of school made it so I was not allowed to be on campus at all. Because of this, I had to use a Hamilton County flyover image for my base map. Other challenges included learning challenging material and troubleshooting bugs in Experience Builder Beta. My schedule was thrown off a bit by the cancellation of school and delay of the Creation Celebration, but what made working on this project the hardest was when my school work dramatically increased in the month of April when I was supposed to be doing mostly this engineering capstone project.

If I were to do this project again, I would have had some more iterations of my website, a way to test it in action and get thoughts and opinions from others. If I had a lot more time to spend, I would love to go deeper into a map that the teachers could use to reserve outdoor classrooms by making not just a map, but an entire system that could communicate between the calendars of the Outdoor Ed team and the teachers. The map I was able to make of the outdoor classroom reservation system works well but is based off of the current google operated system already in place.

I will teach someone at Silverdale how to edit the locations and names of the vendors/exhibits so they can modify the map for the fall Creation Celebration as well as the many more to come. The process of editing is fairly simple and Silverdale has many licenses so a group can also do this if need be.

Silverdale now has an ESRI license so they can continue where I am leaving off. They will have 499 other free users that can learn to use GIS software and solve their own problems with. Being very strong in the STEAM areas, a GIS program or even unit of study could be an excellent addition to Silverdale's curriculum.