Eric Principato

<span style="color: #000000;"><br/> Hi! I am a junior in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, and I am working with Dr. Lyndon Estes on ecological applications of drones. In the field, we use the drones in multi-week field campaigns to photograph agricultural areas, and back at the lab I stitch together the photos to form one large ortho-mosaic, georeference that imagery, analyze it for ecological phenomena, and perform mechanical drone repair and maintenance. Using drones for ecological observation offers advantages over conventional remote sensing techniques: namely, drones can be deployed quickly and often, and they offer high-resolution top-down data. Right now, I am focusing on rectifying imagery from multiple weeks so we can accurately observe temporal patterns in the data.</span>