Novus: An Unmanned Aerial System and Virtual Reality Flight Deck for Data Collection and Visualization
Many emerging technologies offer tremendous new capabilities that will, without question, redefine how we interact with, utilize, understand, and optimize the energy systems around us. Drones offer a new ability to remotely capture data in ways that have previously been impractical. However, their flight control systems remain rudimentary and limit the ability of researchers to fully take advantage of these platforms as remote sensing devices. In this project, we constructed a hexarotor drone and outfitted it with advanced (yet inexpensive) sensors as well as a telemetry data management and control package. We then created a virtual reality flight deck that allows a drone operator to define waypoints "on-the-fly" or take manual control over flight operations. The flight deck provides a live on-board video stream display, a 3-dimensional topographic map with the drone’s position in space overlaid onto it, as well as a data visualization framework that keeps critical information immediately available to the operator. These advances provide a new platform for scientific data collection such as thermography of building envelopes or solar arrays. As the drone is in flight and data are being collected, these data are relayed to the virtual reality environment where they can be inspected for integrity and the flight plan altered if necessary to collect higher quality data. Future work will focus on implementing 3-dimensional mapping using both visible and thermal imagery collected from the drone, and streaming those into the virtual reality flight deck in real time.