UNMANNED AIRCRAFT “DRONE”
Unmanned Aircraft (UA) are commonly known as Drones and aircraft controlled via computer or remote control. As well as being manually flown from the ground, drones can follow a predetermined flight path with a particular purpose and target (autopilot) as it has an integrated GPS device as well as a photo/video camera, and other components connected to the control center. drones can fly from 100 to 3000 meters above sea level.
Drone cameras can capture objects in high resolution and reference their location with high accuracy through geotagging. In recent years, UA are no longer only from commercial,and defense sectors, or amateur enthusiasts, but now drones are being put to another very significant use: conservation, for example, through land use mapping and getting a real time bird’s eye view on deforestation and fire hotspots.
Critical for conservation purposes, drones are able to provide real and accurate dataon forest cover conditions with high resolution to 3 cm. Drones can be used for species identification, measur the density of forest cover and surveying forest characteristics. A key advantage for mapping and ground checking, drones can reach remote locations with no land access extremely quickly which otherwise need a long time to coordinate. Photos and videos from drones provide strong evidence of wrong doings because they have embedded coordinates. Drones can also now be used for photographic and videographic business.
In remote sensing science, drones have become the easiest and the cheapest alternative. Satellite imagery can be obtained easily from sites like NASA and Google, Landsat and Google Earth. However NASA and Google Earth can only be accessed at certain times. With drones we can go and get images whenever we want to.