After traveling thousands of miles by air, a 16-h “road” trip and surviving 3 flat tires, Remo Peduzzi and Simon Wunderli from ResearchDrones personally brought our brand new WHITE Maja drones to conservation… Continue reading
Sander van Andel (Max Planck Institute) flies Conservation Drone Maja in Loango National Park, Gabon, capturing turtle nests on the beach (first ever coastal mission!), forest buffaloes and chimpanzee nests (with a marker). Loangodrone flight overview… Continue reading
If you are using a GoPro HD camera, or any non-GPS enabled video camera, you can use a new web service, GPS4Sport.com, which allows for the synchronization of your APM log (in GPX format)… Continue reading
Video of conservation drone flight over Sepilok by ecologist, Chris Kettle. This is a Conservation Drone 1.0 (Bixler prototype) carrying a Canon IXUS 220 camera (video mode)
Updates from our Conservation Drones Asia Team (Keeyen and his son, and Wee Siong) who is helping ecologist Chris Kettle to conduct drone surveys over forests in Sepilok, Sabah (Borneo). (Link to Keeyen’s… Continue reading
3D forest model of a transect in Sumatra, Indonesia, based on aerial images acquired by Conservation Drones. Data processing by Dronemapper.com. Animation by Ervine Lin of ETH Future Cities Laboratory (futurecities.ethz.ch).
Forum Upon requests from some colleagues and friends, we have now put up a Forum page for general discussions on hardware, software, and other topics concerning Conservation Drones. I hope all of you… Continue reading
Over the last few weeks, ConservationDrones.org has been collaborating with Remo Peduzzi and Simon Wunderlin (from ResearchDrones LLC) to develop the next generation of drones for conservation applications. Remo and Simon bring with… Continue reading
Collage of Orangutan Nests, a set on Flickr. This is a photo-collage of ~35 orangutan nests in SE Asian rain forests taken by cameras on board Conservation Drones. We are collaborating with colleagues… Continue reading
Yes! We have teamed up with DroneMapper.com. DroneMapper operates an innovative SaaS system which allows drone pilots to manage their flight data, build beautiful geo-referenced orthomosaic maps, DEMs and 3D models from aerial… Continue reading
This is an 18-photo composite image of Zurich Zoo’s new elephant enclosure. Aerial photographs were taken by a camera on board an autonomous Conservation Drone 2.0 that was flying at a speed of… Continue reading
We are experimenting with several different airframes for the next fleet of Conservation Drones. One of these models is the X5 which we mentioned earlier. Another promising candidate is the new Condor Skywalker 1880. The main… Continue reading
We finally were able to test our homemade parachute (40″ diameter). Initial tests suggest that a deployment altitude of about 10m above ground should be about just right to minimize drift. Our next… Continue reading
The X5 Wing
Training Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz and the MEME team from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (Management & Ecology of Malaysian Elephants). Emma Stokes and Tony Lynam from WCS dropped by for a peek as… Continue reading
We tried these two new camera placement options under a wing that worked very well in the field. Again, the iSPONGE served its purpose in dampening motor vibration.
Two orangutan nests spotted by a Conservation Drone flying at 100m above ground.
Finally found time and some good weather to test fly the latest addition to our Conservation Drones fleet — ArduCopter. This test flight was fully autonomous, including takeoff and landing. Details of test… Continue reading
Serge and Lian Pin training Alex and Fiona from the Ugalla Primate Project to operate a Conservation Drone bound for Tanzania to survey chimps!
Serge and I spent the last few days in Asten, the Netherlands, building up our Conservation fleet. These will be going to the Jane Goodall Institute, University of Nottingham Malaysia, and WWF Nepal,… Continue reading
The mission of this website is to share our knowledge for building low-cost Conservation Drones to help conservation workers and researchers in developing countries do their jobs a lot more effectively and cost… Continue reading
Conservation Drones are inexpensive, autonomous and operator-friendly unmanned aerial vehicles for surveying and mapping forests and biodiversity. Non-technical operators can program each mission by defining waypoints along a flight path using an open-source… Continue reading
