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Last week, Dries Raymaekers wrapped up a seven-day drone seminar in Lima, Peru. Dries has started a small business in Belgium called Usense, building UAVs for mapping purposes and leading workshops on how to operate them. In cooperation with the KULeuven, and in the framework of the North-Sout-South project sponsored by the Belgian inter-university council, VLIR-UOS, Dries gives international workshops on drone mapping for developing counties. But he's no ambassador, he says: "I'm just a lucky guy who gets to fly drones in South America."

Dries studied bio-engineering at Leuven University in Belgium and Purdue University in Indiana. When he's not traveling or flying drones, he's a researcher at the Flemish Institute of Technological Development (VITO), working on remote sensing technology. He's been building his own UAVs for three years now, ever since he saw the great potential of UAV for mapping purposes. At first, though, available commercial platforms were too expensive and "black-box-like," and Dries wanted to integrate his own sensors and maintain his drones himself. Dries tried a trainer plane, the Bixler, and integrated it with the APM1 autopilot and a small camera to create his first maps. Usense was born.

He's traveled to Colombia and Peru already, with three more countries on the docket—Cuba, Ecuador and Ethiopia. Over four days at La Molina, Peru's National Agrarian University, Dries taught university students to fly a drone, understand the software and sensor technology, and demonstrated possible applications. They spent the next three days high up in the Andes mapping agro-ecosystems. In Peru, drones will enable researchers and farmers to inventory and improve agricultural production. Both the maps and digital terrain models can guide the local farmers to optimize their irrigation systems and fertilization schemes and help them determine which crops to plant on which fields.

Right now Peruvian farmers depend on satellite imagery for crop mapping, but drones can fly under the clouds that often obstruct satellite views—especially valuable during the rainy season when productivity is high and reliable imagery is more urgent. Dries outfit the plane with a normal RGB camera, and used an infrared camera to gather information on vegetation. By the end of the week-long workshop, Dries had given the students training, RC flight experience in real life as well as with a flight simulator, their own plane, a remote controller, batteries, and software.

Dries is a proponent of APM and open-source technology. The people he works with don’t have a lot of money, and to really learn how to fly, first-time pilots have to be able to afford to crash and then pick it up again. Workshop attendees also see potential in being able to build and tune their own drones and use them for their own applications.

For instance, Dries will travel to Ethiopia where they'll use drones to fight malaria spread. The 3D maps can help them identify small ditches—in which mosquito larvae survive during the dry season—to better monitor and control malaria hotspots.

“This work doesn’t end with the workshop,” Dries says. “These researchers will need to pick up the technology, invest in a local team and their own hardware, and start flying for themselves.” Of course, there's the potential of making money, in topography, mining, and other commercial applications beyond his workshops. “But this is what makes the project sustainable.” For this they need low-cost, reliable, and adaptable platforms, like the USENSE-X8 which is based on open-source and COST component.

In the three years of flying his planes (first based on the Bixler, now a strengthened X8) in all kinds of climates, Dries's free APM autopilot has exceded his expectations: he hasn't crashed once during an autopilot mission.

For this he's grateful to Tridge and the other developers in the DIYD community. Other than a few issues with power supply, which is solved as of APM2.5, Dries says the only downside of APM as compared to commercially available UAVs such as Gatewing or Sensefly is that it's not yet as user-friendly for new pilots who need to spend more time learning to fly and operate the electronics. But he says the final output—the imagery—is comparable to both those brands, "plus you're able to fix your plane yourself."

Regarding this imagery, he says we really should be careful what to promise to farmers or other end-users: "Right now you can easily make an ortho-mosaic and 3D model, but more research is needed to derive the required application-specific information—if a farmer is interested in fertilizing, he can get the imagery and visuals, but how does he know how much fertilizer to apply? What you need now are vegetation growth models to relate these images to plant physiological properties. The job of the community—and universities/research institutes—is to investigate in application-specific algorithms."

To learn more about Dries and his company, Usense, click here.