Unmanned Systems Technology 022 | XOcean XO-450 l Radar systems l Space vehicles insight l Small Robot l BMPower FCPS l Prismatic HALE UAV l InterDrone 2018 show report l UpVision l Navigation systems

84 In operation | UpVision UAV’s photography, while UAV technician Jan Fechtner was responsible for piloting the Sirius UAV. Six Czech geologists also went along to provide expertise for planning the mapping routes and altitudes. As it happens, the Erdenet deposits were originally discovered by Czech geologists. Preparations The operations team spent 10 days at the mine, with flights taking place on three of those days. The extra seven days were reserved to account for potential delays, transport and complications such as bad weather that might have pushed back one or more of the three necessary mission days. Over those three days, a total of nine flights were performed by the Sirius, with five flights carried out using the Mavic Air from different locations in the mine, each lasting about 15 minutes. Before the mission could go ahead however, a permit to fly had to be agreed with the Civil Aviation Authority of Mongolia, and with the mine’s owner, the Erdenet Mining Corporation, to help avoid clashes with the latter’s activities in and around the mine. Planning the mission parameters before the actual flights could take place required significant effort. Part of this planning went into identifying the best locations to act as landing sites for the UAV. Two key spots about 3 km apart were chosen, at sites overlooking the mine. The landing sites were selected following a one-day field inspection of the entire mine on the first day of the mission, with a key requirement being the availability of grassy areas roughly 20 to 30 m long (which can be rare in mining zones) to allow the Sirius to touch down safely. So rare was the presence of grass in the prospective landing sites that neither location was a flat, open patch. The first was a steep, grassy incline (which made for comfortable and brief landings by piloting the UAV ‘uphill’). The second location was smaller, bumpier and dotted with stones, the largest of which were too big for the team to remove. This was also a critical factor behind the selection of the Sirius as the workhorse of the mission. Besides the maturity of the technology – as Karas notes, the system has flown more than 10,000 km – a significant appeal for UpVision was the UAV’s ability to switch between automated flight and remote piloting to enable manual landing. That meant Fechtner could directly pilot the UAV to land where the team needed. Given the unusual terrain, autopilots could be limited in their ability to model and carry out safe autonomous landings. “Creating flight plans, which was the next important planning task, was quite difficult owing to the sheer size of the mine area, and the elevations and variations therein. There was also the fact that we had to account for flights launching and landing in the same spot,” says Karas. “So in the end it was necessary to split the mission into nine flights in order to map the entire location. This included mapping in lower resolution at different altitudes to accumulate a wide combination of output data, for capturing a comprehensive mixture of levels of detail,” he adds. The flight plans were generated on a laptop using the MAVinci Desktop software application. This program requires the setting of key basic parameters, such as the type of camera being used, the UAV’s take- off and landing position, and perhaps most important, flight height and image resolution as well as overlaps between photos. Rather than constructing the plans beforehand in an office, this phase was conducted at the mines in order to account more accurately for the immediate climate and conditions the UAV was to face. Once the plans were fully generated, each one (with its flight and photogrammetry tasks) was wirelessly uploaded to the Sirius before a mission. The UAV itself was carried to and from the mine in a special box adapted for use in the cars and aircraft needed to reach Erdenet. The box is shock-proof and specially designed not just for the disassembled UAV but also for spare parts. Reaching the take-off location with it still in its box, UpVision’s personnel would routinely take five minutes to assemble the UAV, check its control surfaces and subsystems by computer, and check it was ready for launch. October/November 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology A UAV’s view of the mine, which sits at an altitude of about 1400 m and employs about 8000 people