There I was…cleaning out the hard drive…when I found this…a draft post from almost two years ago…some imagery that the lads at Hawkeye UAV shared with me after flying tasks in the direct aftermath of the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake…

I’m not sure why I never posted this…possibly too many authoring tools and it was just overlooked…this mission was flown using Kahu as the team started its journey back north. Although Hawkeye’s capabilities have increased geometrically in pretty much every way (aircraft, sensors, software, etc) in the intervening two years, this series still is till a good look at the sequence of a mission from…

…initial mission planning in the flight control software…each of the dots on the map above represents the point where an image will be taken from the aircraft, taking into account factors like wind and light.

The next five images are part of the imagery set collected during the missions

These are then combined into a mosaic…in this case a thermal image of the town from a night mission because silly me has misplaced the daylight mosaic shot…

…and also the image of the 3D model of the town created from these 2D images are photogrammetric processing (some interesting work at Otago University on this process)…but here’s a short clip of some 3D imagery from another task…

Pretty cool…more so when it’s all homegrown Kiwi technology and ingenuity…