The research team proposed to develop a tool for field geologists, golf-mapping industry and ecological monitoring, in which topography is mapped using cameras mounted on an auto-piloted Kite Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These cameras could be visual, near-infrared or thermal or a combination of all of them. The system can generate high resolution (< 1 m) textured Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) that can be uploaded into Google Earth along with derived products such as hillshade and slope maps, providing user-friendly ways of monitoring and mapping. While there are currently a number of UAV technologies and 3D mapping products, this solution has the following features 1) Use of a cost-effective Kite platform that can be flown without any training 2) Multiple sensor integration capability i.e., integrating visual cameras with near-infrared and thermal cameras for enabling novel applications in the field of agricultural monitoring, ecological mapping and pipeline mapping 3) Integration with Google Earth and Maps for easy and effective planning and visualization. The tools that will be developed as part of the proposal will be intuitive and end-user oriented. This will enable UAVs to be used effectively for civilian purposes by non-air-qualified personnel.
Cost-effective Unmanned Aerial Vehicles could change the way large areas are monitored: from crop monitoring to cattle monitoring to environmental protection. The tools that are developed as part of this project may enable these UAVs to be used effectively for civilian purposes. This could usher in a new era of inexpensive, cost-effective vehicles that can be used by farmers, agribusinesses, and mapping professionals, providing businesses with an unprecedented way of increasing the quality, reliability, and amount of information available to them.
At the beginning of the NSF’s I-Corps program, our team at Arizona State University thought that with our idea of monitoring large areas using unmanned aerial vehicles and multispectral cameras, we would be able to sell thousands of robots to different customers like farmers, NGOs that work monitoring wildlife, to large companies like Shell that need pipeline monitoring and many others. We were wrong. The I-Corps program brought us back to reality explaining us what marketing really is; it showed us an invaluable way to start a real business through the customer discovery approach. We were presented with a powerful tool, the Canvas. With it we were able to better understand how to find who would even care about our value propositions, what features they would like to have in it, how to attract those customers and how to keep them. As a result, we were able to quickly identify our customer segment to target only farmers. Early in our customer discovery process, we ran into a 1-contract call where we thought we were already in business and didn't need to pursue our market study any further. However, from I-Corps lectures and coaching, we learned the danger of rushing into a non-scalable, non-repeatable 1-time contract. Started to talk to professors and other specialists from Academia because of our bias toward people speaking the same language we speak, but once again the teaching staff made us realized we were just approaching the problem from the wrong end, and we had to bring the dialogs toward farmers rather than experts. Our first experiences "going out of the building" were extremely useful. We realized what customers would find our idea appealing and most importantly who would pay for it. We needed to learn more about the different relationships they had. By talking to several farmers, specialists and chemical companies we started to grasp how the entire ecosystem worked. And so we had to modify our search and questions to really understand what farmers were really interested in. A key insight we gathered by just going out and talking to the people on the ground (in Florida, Arizona, Atlanta, and California) either at their farms or at workshops were that farmers and specialists were not interested in unmanned aerial vehicles (or any other technologies); they were interested in a solution that would allow them increase produce and reduce costs. After numerous iterations and countless interviews we completely transformed our initial ideas. We went from selling robots to several different kinds of customers to simply providing an end-to-end data collection, analysis and delivery service that helps farmers making decisions about their crops. We learned that we should not start from our technical expertise to finding a problem we can solve and to finally finding a customer that has this problem, but we should actually do the opposite: after coming up with our idea, find possible customers, learn if our idea has any value given the problems they have, and find a solution based on our expertise to address those market needs.
