FLYING SENSOR TRAINING

Flying Sensor training to empower local farmers to increase yields

HiView provides training to empower local operators with the ability to use Flying Sensors independently in order to increase their yields. The training is conducted by ThirdEye, a company based in Mozambique and Kenya, that offers Flying Sensor (drone, UAV) skill training and capacity building in Africa since 2013. It was established through a collaboration of FutureWater and HiView. First trainings were organized within the USAID supported ThirdEye project in Mozambique, that eventually evolved into a company in the years that followed. Besides the trainings in Mozambique other trainings followed in other countries, the Netherlands, Madagascar, and Kenya. The participants of the training often have different interests, varying from agriculture to land management or other fields. They have one point in common, the wish to become a flying sensor operator that knows how to pilot the Flying Sensor in a safe and responsible way and how to process the various images that are derived from a multiple cameras.

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The purpose of our Flying Sensor (FS) trainings is two-fold, i) piloting and ii) image processing and interpretation.

Part 1. Piloting

The first stage is about operating the FS. Emphasis is put on safety. Safety management is the cornerstone of every good air vehicle exploiting company. It implies well-organized procedures for launch, flight, and landing, as well as other affiliated components like material knowledge, battery management, crowd management, logging, reporting. All the aspects of a good functioning flight organization are dealt with in the Operational Manual from HiView. When safety is maximized the pilot can operate in an optimal way. In this part of the training he or she will learn both how to perform manual flights and automated flights.

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Part 2. Image processing and interpretation

Different cameras produce different images for various applications. ThirdEye is active in many sectors. To name some: agriculture (crop stress maps, irrigation monitoring, elevation models of crop fields), land management (change detection, land degradation monitoring), forestry (illegal logging inspection, plant classification). The different types of FS images demand specific treatment. The trainees learn how to process and produce results like geo-referenced orthomosaics, crops stress maps, DEMs (digital elevation models).