After months of development and heartache, the journalism drone takes flight

Months of planning, training, re-design, and fabrication finally paid off for DroneJournalism.org developers, as we successfully launched a journalism drone for the first time on Sunday, June 3, in the small Illinois town of Tuscola.

Eventually the drone will be equipped with an Arduino-based autopilot (APM 2.0) and cameras to collect aerial photography and aerial photomaps for use in journalism investigations. JournoDrone 2 is the successor to JournoDrone One, which was meant to be a "Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) for journalists that is powerful, durable, transportable, affordable, upgradeable and supported by a community of experts."

JournoDrone One was smashed to pieces during testing in two months ago. Since then, I had been applying the lessons learned from the first drone to make a drone for journalism that was stronger and more capable.

The June 3 flight was a basic shakedown of the airframe, without autopilot or sensors, to prove the airworthiness of the drone. While the airframe proved slightly heavy and unpredictable at times, our indication is with some modification it will be a competent flyer for our purposes.

JournoDrone 2 is based on the "FPV Raptor" radio controlled airplane with some important modifications, the most important of which is carbon fiber-reinforced fuselage. The airplane had a fairly good track record as a First Person Video drone, so we didn't feel that we needed to change the layout of the craft. Yet we needed to have an extra layer of security to make it more of a "tool" rather than "toy."

While we had some initial concerns about weight gain, the two layers of carbon fiber and epoxy proved its worth when the aircraft experienced a sudden gust of wind in its second flight and crashed. While the impact separated the motor pod, chipped the propeller, bent the motor shaft, and cracked the casing of an on-board camera, the fuselage was totally unscathed. We were not able to recover the on-board video of that second flight.

JournoDrone 2: Learning from the past, Looking to the future

JournoDrone One had an important mission: to be a drone journalism platfom that was "powerful, durable, transportable, affordable, upgradeable and supported by a community of experts." It became a pile of foam instead.

But that's OK. Drone development, especially at this state of technology, is a matter of trial-and-error. That's why myself and fellow DroneJournalism.org developer Acton Gorton are giving it another shot. We are taking all of the experience, knowledge, and goals from the JournoDrone One project and starting again with JournoDrone 2.

Drone Journalism Development: Final Lessons from JournoDrone One

When JournoDrone One met its end last month, taking one final dive into the grass and shattering into foamy bits, it dashed the hopes of DroneJournalism.org developers of an easy solution to drone journalism. However, we were well aware that this enterprise had a learning curve. And we did have some measure of success, and learned some valuable lessons that will help us and other drone journalists in the future.

We can say for certain that the drone flew. It didn’t fly very high – 12 feet or so – or for very long – perhaps 5 seconds at most. But it did fly.

Above is the only on-board footage of the first and only flight of JournoDrone One. For most of the video, the shadow of the drone’s nose is visible in the bottom of the image, except for the last few seconds when the drone lifts off. That’s when the image starts to bob and weave, because there’s no longer wheels and landing gear keeping the craft stable.

Only one minute and eight seconds could be recovered from the GoPro HD camera mounted to the bottom of the craft. That’s because I maneuvered the aircraft with very little altitude, and inadvertently sent it in a downward trajectory. Upon impact, the GoPro separated from its mounting case and ejected its SD card before it had a chance to write the remainder of the flight to the card. This also corrupted the file, and so a freeware program was used to recover what little footage the GoPro managed to record.

What went into the drone, and what did I get out of it? Here’s the details.

Drone Journalism - Cheap Coverage from the Sky for TV News Stations

JournoDrone One outfitted with a small HD camera for aerial videography. The potential for these devices to capture live video from the sky, on the cheap, has generated interest from the television news industry.

Although we’re several years away in terms of regulation and technology for making drones a feasible, low-cost platform for television news, the television news industry has started to talk about using drones to enhance coverage.

Myself, along with Matt Waite of Nebraska’s Drone Journalism lab, were recently interviewed by the television news trade journal TV Technology. It briefly mentions DroneJournalism.org and our (unfortunately now departed) JournoDrone One (pictured above).

Tom Butts, the writer of the piece and the editor in chief of the TV Technology magazine, focuses mainly on drones as a cheap alternative to manned helicopters for live news events. He also draws attention to how ethical or technical mishaps with drone technology could slow or prevent the adoption of drone technology in the TV broadcasting industry.

Here’s some excerpts below:

Drone Journalism: The News Choppers of Tomorrow
By Tom Butts

For TV news crews, operating an “eye in the sky” means hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in aircraft maintenance and fuel costs. Using choppers also comes with inherent risks that have resulted in numerous accidents over the years.

As stations look to save money while reducing safety concerns, some in the news business are beginning to examine the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to obtain highly valuable news coverage from above. While it’s a relatively new concept for journalists, the technology of “drone journalism” is familiar and extremely cost-effective when compared to traditional aircraft.

In essence, drone journalism involves the use of remote-controlled small aircraft outfitted with cameras to acquire footage from the air. What defines “aircraft” could be anything from a toy helicopter purchased at the local mall to more sophisticated devices, and the camera could be a typical point-and-shoot to a more expensive DSLR with video capabilities.

There’s just one problem. The use of such devices is illegal in the United States – for now, at least. Last month, as part of its latest budget, Congress gave the Federal Aviation Administration until 2015 to develop a set of rules and guidelines authorizing the commercial use of such remote-controlled unmanned aerial devices. And several researchers and entrepreneurs are exploring the technical – and perhaps even more important – ethical uses of these drones.

…

JOURNODRONE

Matthew Schroyer, a drone and data journalist at the University of Illinois-Champagne [sic] created dronejournalism.org as a forum to discuss and share ideas about the subject and is developing a UAV dubbed the “JournoDrone,” based on designs from diydrones.com. Schroyer is approaching the subject matter more from a data-gathering standpoint, using still photographs to stitch together maps from aerial surveying.

“We are getting to the point where a journalist can build a drone for himself and fly it and use it to collect all sorts of interesting data and information that you couldn’t get before without this perspective,” Schroyer said. “These platforms are so versatile… I could really see this technology taking off and being adopted in a lot of newsrooms.”

Up until now, must of the public has become aware of drones through news reports about their use in military operations – and then only when something goes wrong. This has created a public relations problem that both [Matt] Waite [a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln] and Schroyer believe could be compounded if the commercial use of drones is abused, specifically to violate people’s privacy.

“We don’t send photographers to people’s houses with long telephoto lenses and we don’t trespass on someone’s private property to use those lenses to take pictures through people’s windows,” Waite said. “Why would using a drone make that any more OK? It wouldn’t. There are significant questions of people’s rights, the right to assembly and the government’s powers to monitor people that come with this technology.”

…

What happens if the paparazzi start using drone cameras to spy on celebrities? How far would they go? This is one of Schroyer’s main concerns. “The entire field of dorne journalism could be stifled by one incident and then we could lose all this reporting ability,” he said. “We don’t want that to happen.”

You can read the full story at http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/tvt_20120411/index.php#/70

Meantime, I'll be delivering news on the status of JournoDrone One here and on DroneJournalism.org in the near future. That update will have information on our progress, where we're headed in the near future, as well as advice for drone journalists who are trying to develop their own drones.

The Harrisburg tornado, the JournoDrone, and a well-deserved crash

Aerial photograph of Harrisburg, IL. Not taken by JournoDrone One.

Today, the southern Illinois town of Harrisburg is morning six of its own who were killed by a 170 mile per hour, 200 yard tornado. It was one of the 16 tornadoes that ripped through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, claiming 13 lives.

Tuesday night, while news networks came from far and wide to cover the devastation on the ground, I worked to prepare JournoDrone One to film the disaster from the sky. For better or worse, the drone never made it to Harrisburg.

JournoDone One is a test mule for DroneJournalism.org, which myself and fellow drone journalism developer Acton Gorton hope will pave the way for a low-cost, highly durable and transportable small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) for journalists.

JD-01 had never flown a mission before, let alone been tested. So the idea of rushing to Harrisburg and filming anything was a long shot, but something I felt I needed to try. This was a disaster just three and a half hours’ drive from home base, and if I had anything to say about it, I would be putting my equipment to good use. And I do venture to natural disasters on a whim.

Of course, it wouldn’t do any good to drive to the storm-ravaged town of Harrisburg just to nose-dive a drone into the rubble after takeoff. The town had enough grief and did not need some clumsy pilot crashing drones into things and making things worse. So instead, I had a test flight in Champaign, where I dove the drone into a freezing field. Here’s what happened.

Project JournoDrone: A fixed-wing drone system for journalism

From Dronejounrnalism.org:

Developers at DroneJournalism.org are launching a project to build a low-cost aerial photo platform for journalists, using a combination of off-the-shelf radio-control components and open source electronics. Their goal is to develop a small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) for journalists that is powerful, durable, transportable, affordable, upgradeable and supported by a community of experts.

Now one month into the project, development on “JournoDrone One,” or JD-1, is approximately 20 percent complete. DroneJournalism.org is working to secure funding to complete the project by the summer of 2012. The knowledge gained from making and using the drone for aerial photography will allow DroneJournalism.org to bring a similar system to journalists worldwide.

Leading the project is Matthew Schroyer, the founder of DroneJournalism.org, who holds a master’s in journalism from the University of Illinois. Mr. Schroyer has a background in engineering, experience with small, radio-control devices, and experience in using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for data journalism purposes.

“We hope this is the first of many drones that DroneJournalism.org will develop,” he said. “It’s a practical exercise of existing off-the-shelf drone technology, and our first step into a frontier that could greatly expand public knowledge.”