Capstone Assignment 6: Why Unmanned Aerial Systems?

A standalone degree in Purdue University's Polytechnic Institute, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) encompasses a multitude of subjects, skills, and activities that challenge students to maximize the applications, data, and relevance of UAV technology in a professional an innovative way. While balancing factors such as the rapidly changing business arena, consumer needs, and aviation law, this degree will produce cost effective solutions to problems that were once deemed impossible to address. In a "typical" UAS activity, I am expected to critically consider factors shown in Figure 1. Although Unmanned Aerial Systems can be both way more and way less complex depending on the operation, I am one of the few that get to directly engage in this type of workflow each day.

Figure 1: UAS Topics

With a combination of multimodal training approaches, research opportunities, and hands on field experience, I have earned presentation time slots at research conferences throughout the last two years. As part of the tradition, I am in charge of designing my own poster, but in the case of  preparing a poster for Purdue's GIS Day I also worked a team of 10 to create a Capstone poster in 2 hours. Shown below in Figure 2 is the PDF version of the Capstone poster which demonstrates the deliverables of UAS data specific to our department.  

Figure 2:  AT 409 Capstone Poster