Western Sydney is the first Sydney-based University to formalise its drone operations.Based on the 2011 novel of the same name by E.L. Read more: More trees effectively cools urban areas says UTS’s Brent Jacobs Teaching areas will include undergraduate and postgraduate courses in arts, creative industries, engineering, forensics, social and environmental sciences, tourism and urban planning. Dr Pfautsch said the drones will also be used in forensic investigation research, “to remodel a birds-eye view of accidents to see if it’s worthwhile looking from above.” Other areas of research will include land use change, fauna surveying, precision agriculture, energy management, bridge surveys, building performance, drought assessment, and insect/disease monitoring. According to Dr Pfautsch, if the DRTU program is successful, the uni will attempt to get funding and expand the operation after 12 months. “There are lots of different uses - the sky’s the limit! We have the opportunity to be really creative here,” Dr Pfautsch said. I want to look at where trees should go to make Sydney cooler - the urban canopy, where do you put it?” Read more: Hawkesbury Council moves to create cooler streets through trees The drones will also be used in teaching geographic information science (GIScience), with students potentially being able to fly drones to get 3D models of surfaces for geospatial analysis. “I also want to use them to look at ‘heat island’ effects in urban landscapes. “Using temperature instead of just visuals, it’s much easier to estimate how big these colonies are,” he said. He said the drones would be used to look at local flying fox colonies with a view to counting them. And locations will be due-referenced, so when it tells you that you were at a location, you really were there!” Dr Pfautsch said. “These are not the one thousand-dollar drones from the toy store shelf - these are about $30,000 each and have heat seeking cameras in them. He said the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment’s (HIE) EucFACE site - which maps the effects of exposure to rising CO2 levels on native forests and animals - currently sits in the ‘exclusion zone’, but from early next year, his team will be able to use drones there for wildlife surveillance.
“We will negotiate directly with the RAAF base operators to work out the time windows when we can fly,” Dr Pfautsch told the Gazette. He said the DRTU model will allow the uni to negotiate with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) - which regulates the use of drones - to use drones in designated ‘no fly’ zones, including the airspace surrounding the Richmond RAAF base which is shared by the Hawkesbury campus. Dr Sebastian Pfautsch from the WSU School of Social Sciences and Psychology said ten people have been trained-up so far from the Hawkesbury, Parramatta South and Bankstown campuses to fly drones for the project. The Drone Research and Teaching Unit (DRTU) will be launched in the new year, centralising activities involving remotely-piloted aircrafts (RPA) – or drones – at the University, for both research and teaching purposes. USING drones to map urban heat, as well as in wildlife and forensic investigations, will be focusses for a new research unit involving Hawkesbury researchers at Western Sydney University (WSU).