Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.
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67 unmanned systems inside April/May 2016 ENGINEERING. PRACTICE. POLICY. Photo courtesy of Museum of London Archaeology within the University of Cambridge. "Drones provide key surveying capabilities and point the way to new excavation sites." Recent digs by CUA include the excavation at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire, dubbed the 'British Pompeii' because of its well-preserved Bronze Age dwellings. "The drone is especially useful before we be- gin digging," Dickens said, "giving us a wider view of an entire site, helping us to identify pos- sible areas of interest—essentially seeing things that we cannot see clearly from ground level." While Dickens stresses the pre-excavation utility of drones, others are using them right through the excavation process. "We now use a drone on a daily basis for rapid, low-altitude, vertical shots, which we rectify and use for mapping archaeological remains," said professor Jan Driessen of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. Driessen, who is director of the Sissi excava- tions (www.sarpedon.be) on the island of Crete and co-director of the Pyla-Kokkinokremos excavations on Cyprus, as well as director of the Belgian School at Athens, said they were getting general views, with their drone, but also interesting oblique shots, close-ups and wide angles. They are using a DJI Phantom 2, which he said does the job quite admirably. When drones f irst started appearing in numbers, Driessen said, his colleague Joachim Bretschneider, a professor of Near Eastern Ar- chaeology at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghent, acquired one of the machines. They now use it jointly in their dif- ferent excavations in Crete and Cyprus. "I have been researching Minoan and Bronze-Age archaeology in Crete since 1981," said Driessen. "All through the 80s and 90s and up until 2011, we used balloons and kites with cameras for aerial photography." The Phantom 2, then the newest in the Phan- tom series, was quite an impressive platform when it first appeared in his workplace, he said "It is ready-to-f ly and very quick to use— you just insert the battery; you don't have to mount or dismantle the drone each time. It is light and easy to transport; it's very safe; and it is also rather small and discrete, so it doesn't scare potential visitors." Driessen said the equipment is not necessari- ly cheaper than balloons and kites, but once you have a drone system up and running, operating costs are negligible, and there is a significant improvement in terms of flight capabilities. "You can f ly in almost all weather circum- stances, while a kite needs just the right wind, and a balloon doesn't want any wind at all." And, unlike balloons and kites, a drone is unte- thered, so it can reach the less accessible places, "LEGISLATION REGARDING DRONE FLIGHT is in permanent fux, partly because regulators are having a tough time keeping pace with the technological advances and the 'democratization' of drones resulting from falling prices." Jan Driessen, Catholic University of Louvain A member of the nonproft Museum of London Archaeology team works with a drone at the Maldon Barge Graveyard in Essex County England. The site is part of a volunteer project called the Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network (CITiZAN) created to monitor and record at-risk heritage areas.