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Archaeology’s taking to the air. Researchers spent a month this summer testing a semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle—basically a semi-autonomous drone—high in the Andes in Peru. The goal: to scan a colonial town from the 1500s that had been built over an Incan settlement, and then abandoned.
It’s a collaboration between Vanderbilt University archaeologist Steven Wernke and engineering professor Julie Adams. Adams tricked out a vehicle from Aurora Flight Sciences to include cameras and algorithms that allow the drone to achieve optimal flight patterns. The resulting detailed 3-D map will be much more precise than high-resolution satellite images.
Here’s Steven Wernke: “By our calculations this vehicle will be able to take imagery of an area in about 10-15 minutes that would take two or three entire field seasons using traditional methods.”
The system can fit into a backpack. Once the researchers incorporate what they learned, they hope the technology can assist in the rapid cataloguing of a variety of archaeological sites, some of which are already being lost to the ravages of new developments and time.
—Cynthia Graber
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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3 Comments
Add CommentI think the word "backback" would have been "backpack". What do u think about it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr knapsack or rucksack
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, that is it! In the link “semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle” of the podcast the word utilized is backpack.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt second paragraph is written the following beside a picture of a flying device:
“At Mawchu Llacta, a 16th-century colonial town in Peru, scientists are testing a remote-controlled flying device called SUAVe (Semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), which is small enough to fit in a backpack and takes photographs at higher resolution than satellite imagery.”