UAV Aerial Survey - Blackquarries Hill Long Barrow (Data Paper)

The aim of this project was to conduct a low-altitude aerial survey of Blackquarries Long Barrow (ST77509320) in order to produce a re-usable dataset (Gray 2014c), to within a known degree of accuracy. A second objective was to construct and make available an exemplar UAV survey dataset. A custom-build hexacopter UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) was used to collect data, running Ardupilot 3.1 firmware in conjunction with Mission Planner v1.1. The flight was conducted at approximately 25m above ground level at a vertical speed of approximately 2.5m/s. The camera used was a Canon Powershot S110 running CHDK 1.2.0 and a standard intervalometer script. The intervalometer script was set to take a photograph every 5 seconds. The number of photographs taken was ultimately constrained by flight time, limited by the capacity of the battery used to power the hexacopter. Ground Control Point (GCP) markers were used to support the georeferencing of the photographs