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GeoWorld October 2012

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NEWSLINK UAV Approach Aids Archaeological Mapping A project undertaken by researchers from Vanderbilt University seeks to apply new technology to speed the mapping of archaeological sites, turning a chore that can sometimes take years into a task that could take only minutes. At the heart of the work is an effort to map the abandoned colonial-era town of Mawchu Llacta, Peru. The project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Vanderbilt Archaeologist Steven Wernke and Engineering Professor Julie A. Adams, uses the Skate unmanned aerial vehicle from Aurora Flight Sciences. The vehicle, which can be transported in a backpack, operates as part of a broader system that includes software for discerning an optimal flight pattern and rendering data collected as a 3-D map. Researchers have branded the project's UAV por- tion "SUAVe," which stands for "Semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle." "It can take two or three years to map one site in two dimensions," said Wernke. "The SUAVe system should transform how we map large sites that take several seasons to document using traditional meth- ods. It will provide much higher-resolution imagery than even the best satellite imagery, and it will pro- duce a detailed 3-D model." The steps involved in the SUAVe process are rela- tively few. "You unpack it, specify the area that you need it to cover and then launch it," added Wernke. "[After] capturing the images, it lands, and the images are downloaded, matched into a large mosaic, and transformed into a map." Adams said the algorithms developed for the project can compensate for wind speed, sun angle and photographic details such as image overlap and resolution. "The only way for this system to be cost-effective is for it to be easy enough to operate that you don't need an engineer on every site," she said. "It has to be useable without onsite technical help." The researchers conducted tests of the system at Mawchu Llacta in July and August 2012, with plans to return in 2013 after addressing follow-up test issues in the lab. The town, built in the 1570s at a former Inca settlement, was abandoned in the 19th century and encompasses architecture arranged in regular blocks across an area covering the equivalent of about 25 football fields square. Survey flights took place at altitudes above 13,000 feet and used a high-definition camera to capture still images that were "stitched" together using Agisoft's PhotoScan product. The resulting imagery was othorectified using Esri's ArcGIS software, and researchers accessed the othorectified result on iPads running Garafa's GIS Pro software for data col- lection. The imagery gleaned ultimately offered higher quality than what researchers would have obtained using satellites. Wernke believes the new approach holds potential Imagery gathered from a UAV shows the archaeological remains of the Peruvian colonial town of Mawchu Llacta, site of a recent Vanderbilt University mapping project. 8 GEO W ORLD / O CT O BE R 2O12 for enabling researchers to quickly catalog many archaeological sites—an important development given that many sites are being overtaken by devel- opment and the effects of time. The researchers also suggest that SUAVe could apply to other needs, such as tracking the progress of global warming or assist- ing first responders at disaster sites. "The SUAVe system should be a way to create a digital archival registry of archaeological sites before it's too late," he said. AURORA FLIGHT SCIENCES

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