Small UAV uses hyperspectral imager

Headwall Photonics' (Fitchburg, MA, USA) Micro-Hyperspec imaging sensor is being successfully deployed onboard small commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to help agriculturalists monitor vegetation over wide areas.

To develop the system, engineers at Headwall worked collaboratively with Pablo Zarco-Tejada, a principal investigator at the Instituto de Agricultura Sostenible (IAS) in Spain.

Accurate spectral scenes of farmlands and crop fields can now be quickly rendered by using the miniaturized hyperspectral imagers on the long-duration commercial UAVs that crisscross farmland to yield a mosaic of data-rich images.

"Size, weight, and power requirements are important concerns when deploying this technology aboard airborne vehicles, so we developed and engineered the aberration-corrected Micro-Hyperspec sensor with that in mind," says David Bannon, CEO of Headwall Photonics.

With a small size and payload weight of less than 1.5 lb, the Micro-Hyperspec imaging sensor is available in both VNIR ("very-near"-infrared, 380-1000 nm) and NIR configurations (900-1700 nm).

The Micro-Hyperspec is available as a complete airborne configuration consisting of a small, accurate GPS/INS unit, data-processing engine with solid-state drive, and application software necessary to acquire and display hyperspectral datacubes with both spectral and spatial resolution.

-- By Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design