hey guys,
It been a very long time i haven't been punctual for writing blog posts but this time i would like to share my experience with you which was just awesome the climate the place and everything that happened there.
Well a short brief of what you will get to read in this blog post of fpvcrazy is as follows : I would be writing about my experience mapping a 2km span of mountain surface with a DJI phantom 4 pro drone for BRO "Border Road Organisation" for maintaining and repairing the roads and avoiding land slides. It is very risky to work in such environments and very difficult in such climatic conditions various factors to be count in the battery temperatures and the cold weather and the next thing would be risky roads to travel 🙂 .
This project is been executed by team members of Brainwing and ThinkAerial.
Chalo then Lets start the story telling :
So this project came to us with some of our colleague who wanted us to use UAV's for mapping the landslides and give them analytics results which we expertise in. These guys are very experienced and have been into GIS industry since a very long time executing various projects of GIS and city management and irrigation department and wanted to experiment with us the use of UAV as it is fast and easy to deploy and acquire data then to risk humans and costly equipment's so inshort its about replacing or trying our new photogrammetry tech with the traditional total station and lazer scanners.
Well coming to the point again... the journey was amazing and difficult too. Our iternary had 1full day of travel 17hours i must say... We took a flight from Mumbai to Delhi has to wait there for 2-3 hours for our connecting flight to dehradun and as you know carrying drones in flight is another level of task... i neva had issues though but at delhi airport its a bad place to argue on anything or say anything complex just accept what ever they say and you will be through 😛 ... What happened at the transfers was we started moving towards our next gate for dehradun and at transfers security check security was idle as i guess no one travel at 2am 😛 I forgot to mention we took a flight from mumbai at 2am ie: i was awake the whole night as always 🙂 well those guys started looking at my drone like its some Lamborghini and started asking me the same questions how much is the range and flight time also for what purpose are you taking this ??? whom do you work for ? and when we answered their questions to keep his ego alive he asked me to remove the battery from the drone and keep it in my bag 🙂 which made no sense but yes i am not sure if the drone can automatically get powered on and start flying if this is what he was thinking as you know the project was risky and tough has to manually fly in such areas without any auto flights without using any apps.
I am going to answer a very often asked question- How to carry drones in flight in India?? answer is below..
I carried about 6 batteries with me 3 in the drone bag and 3 in my bag back everything is always cabin luggage as i do not want them to throw my drone here and there while loading. Batteries are always to be carried in cabin with a bag pack and if needed a lipo safe bag.
My story is going to be in detail i have already uploaded lot of stories and pics on my social media handle to follow me on such projects and learn more about drones do follow :
This blog post is going to be a long long post 🙂 stay tuned more exciting things are going to come up.
So we reached Dehradun airport and waited for our driver sir for half hour 😛 and then was a long travel on a very difficult road small roads with both side cars and big trucks road constructions going on.
I dont remember much of the trip as i passed out and slept for 10hrs 🙂 yes the road journey from dehradun to our base camp was 10hrs ride and our drive should be given a salute as he drove all the way one straight ride without any break except breakfast and he has just came from some other trip continuous driving 🙂
We visited our base camp that house was rented by the company as the project is gonna be a long time thing so feasible that way. Well it was a 2bhk and awesome furnished room . water was 24hrs hot and chilled cold 🙂 i would fill my bucket and put in cold drinks to freeze when we were out as fridge wasnt needed there temperatures were about 18degree and less first night it reached 3 degrees i had no idea as we all were tired and slept for long and early.
We were staying at Joshimath and everything you find there is only VEG no nonVEG.
Our team had me and my friend Akshay Uchil who is leading our company for business development and expertise in electronics system and our of our sir.
Well we were obvsly young 25 years of age and one very experience guy aged 40 years.
We had fun went in the market found shops and places to eat and drink well one thing was common in all was menu was same with everyone you will get to eat prathas and all there. Amazingly we also saw dosa there 😛
well on first day akshay wanted to eat pizza we did found a board saying pizza and nonveg together 😛 lol we went to find it but didnt get it as it was our first day we didnt went to far didnt wanted to get lost.
Next day we went to the site and inspected the area and the mountain it was very diverse almost very big truck sized stones were already ready to fall..... 🙁 and atleast me standing down was concerned.
Took some test flights and processed the data in trail version of pix4d jusst to check if it worked alright results were out at night though and yes it worked 🙂 experince mattered here as i have already done some similar 3dmodels mapping like buildings and all hence it worked well in mapping you also need to understand the way the software work ie: the processing algorithm and need to have backup of a very technical guy who can guide you ... i have my friend tabish to back me up 🙂
We all make a great team here .. At thinkaerial and brainwing we have all kind of talents and we have been known for fast and precise data capture.
So the 1st day of work was 2nd october and everyone had holiday there officers were resting and hence we decided to do it on 3rd october and hence we were free and decided to go to Badrinath temple.
Well we were very lucky to reach there on time and get out of there in time as gates are strictly closed to travel no night travel is allowed as roads arent safe and you could fall off anytime.
Some Images i could attach are below
well temple doors are opened at 3pm and we were just on time went in and had blessing and all and left as soon as possible as we had to reach our base camp orelse we would have to stay there only as i said roads would be closed.
Now the next day.....After anaylizing the outputs and reports we decided to put up markers on road and hence we had to reach there on time.
We woke up at 8 and went to meet the cheif of BRO responsible for all the roads in the area SIR was great and very technical it was a amazing meet and a great guy i must say.
Went to the location took one of the guys he was very helpful gave us paint yellow and black we had to walk 2.25 km to and fro to put the markers.
Well now the time is 12pm and everyone is tired even me and we took 10mins break i did setup a base there too for my laptop and charging dock we started our drone flying.
Well took various angles and nadirs and as said i had to go full road which was zigzag everything was assumption and experience based work as there is no such method to follow in such projects.
i think i finished the whole road at 3pm totally and atlast i got some free time to fly free.
Majorly we need to check for the lights as lights is very important at this locations we need to be very concered abt the execution time mountains have a shadow problem.
So data need to be done early good time is from 8am to 2pm.
After doing this kept for preprocessing and travelled back to base camp.
Funny thing was uptill now it was 3 days we been staying here amazing view out side the door and windows it was very chilled at night and we would walk down like half a km to eat and on the last day we got to know there was a restaurant just besides our stay hardly 2mins and they offered nonveg too.. lol i wondered why didnt we see it before.
It was fun on the project and we left on the 4th day at 5am as there was some strike of local tourist vechiles and we wanted to avoid it due to our flights we had similar patterns of flight location - dehradun-delhi-mumbai.
But on the way back due to work going on the roads we had to stop in traffic and a bad event u may say bt everyone was safe.
2 cars behind us was a bus full of passenegers and a rock sized same as our innova fell and banged into the bus everyone paniked we saw people running infront of our car when i turned back off shittt a big rock slammed into the bus we were lucky we were ahead if it was a small car like innova we would have been down the cliff....
but lucky enough and then full way down no one slept 🙂 lol we stopped at the same location where we did while coming to the base camp ate parathas and tea i had limbu pani also where in the uncle mixed jaljira into it,it was releif as usually i have gas filled up due to travel and food some soda did the work.
Now towards mumbai well we had to wait for 4 hours at dehradun airport and the plane was a twin engine one and mind it dehradhun has its last flight at 7pm i think ours was the second last flight from dehradun.
we reached delhi again has to wait for 2 hours and our bad luck we had to wait more due to some technical issues we went twice to the food court nthng to do we had to just seat and watch people .
at last at 2am we were in Mumbai airport and we took a cab reached home by 3am and thats where our journey concluded. I have kept the data for processing and soon will upload the results to this post.
Hope you liked to read the story if you want to read more of the project stories pls. do comment which will motivate me to write the live blogs too while on project.
It was an amazing experience also i would upload the images soon.
Do visit us at : BRAINWING & THINKAERIAL
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