![]() What turns an RC airplane into a true unmanned aerial vehicle is the ability for it to rely on its autopilot functionality.” Uses for UAVs Hupy and his new company recently got to employ some of this technology while doing some work at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake near Ridgecrest, California. “RC is radio controlled, so you have your radio controller and you are flying that as a pilot. “What has happened is that the world of RC and the world of what was a true UAV have crossed so much that there is this weird grey area,” he says. “You don’t need satellites, and you don’t need to send that manned airplane from the airport.” Hupy says that fixed-wing UAVs really aren’t that different from the radio-controlled airplanes that you can buy in hobby shops. Hupy has also been introducing his students to the possibilities of UAV technology. “On my end, I’m trying to give students that introduction of you can take really, really high-resolution imagery with crazy details for not a lot of money,” he says. “It can be as low-tech as putting a camera on a string on a balloon or it can be as high-tech as putting these cameras on these crazy planes that have solar panels,” he says. (UAS stands for “unmanned aerial systems.) The company utilizes everything from balloons and kites to rotocopters and fixed-wing UAVs to gather images or data from above. He formed Hupy UAS in 2011 with his wife, Christina. It is basically your autopilot motherboard.” Hupy was inspired to act. ![]() The other factor coming into this is the fact that GPS technology has come so far that now you can have a fairly small GPS unit communicating with more or less a centralized computer. “Technology has gotten so cheap and so lightweight that now you can start putting that on a flying platform. (Another name for a UAV is drone.) “It is really this perfect storm of all of these different phenomena that have come together,” Hupy says. He found that with digital cameras, GPS receivers, and a basic unmanned aerial vehicle ( UAV), you can get lots of information without spending lots of money. What if he just used inexpensive, easily available technology to get the information he needed? Hi-Res, Low Cost Hupy brought the idea back to Wisconsin, where he is a geography and anthropology professor at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He quickly learned that using LIDAR, a remote sensing technology used to make high-resolution maps, was too expensive and probably impossible to use in rural Vietnam. “It was kind of like that a-ha moment where oh boy, there has to be a different way of doing this and here it is.” Hupy’s “different way of doing things” was to map the land from above, rather than from ground-level. Attempting to survey the land, Hupy found his body covered in land leeches and cut by elephant grass, a tall tropical plant with razor-sharp edges. In 2010, Professor Joseph Hupy was in South Vietnam trying to map the site of the Battle of Khe Sanh, one of the most infamous battles of the Vietnam War.
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