GIS views county from the skies

By Tom Hintgen (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Monday, July 14, 2008

Is it a bird, or a plane...or a Geographical Information System with wings?

If you’ve seen what appears to be a large model airplane buzzing across the skies of Otter Tail County, you may have wondered, too.

Otter Tail County is home to the nation’s only mobile camera flying with orthorectified photography technology, a special unmanned aerial photography platform.

“GIS (Geographical Information System) ties all the records together. Everything is connected to a piece of land,” said Brian Armstrong, GIS Spatial/Address Coordinator. “GIS takes analysis, maps it and then develops a relational data base.”

The GIS Department started looking for an unmanned aerial photography platform (UMAP) in 2006.

The county unmanned plane can be programmed or operated by county employees using manual remote control. The plane, with a wingspan of eight feet, is computerized and will land within 75 yards of its destination. All landings are made manually for safety reasons.

“The detail available from this type of photo allows for greater analysis and uses compared to State Wide Scale photography or Google photography,” Armstrong said.

The UMAP also allows for small scale affordable photo analysis that would not be available or would be too prohibitive using conventional photography, he said.

Benefits to Otter Tail County include addressing, ditch assessments, help in computerization of records and assistance to various county departments.

“Parcels for county-owned land are now computerized and entered into our GIS system,” Armstrong said. “The county ditch system is being computerized. We’ll be working in a cooperative effort with the communities throughout the county to assist in the completion of their parcel GIS coverage. Photos have been completed for Battle Lake.”

The county’s unmanned plane weighs only six pounds and consists of balsa/foam construction, similar to a regular remote control hobby plane. It holds a 10-megapixel camera, has an air speed indicator and receiver, GPS and onboard auto-pilot.

County employees can use a standard remote control transmitter and there’s radio modem for which the computer can talk to the plane when the plane is in flight.

The autopilot system is manufactured by the same company that developed autopilot software for the U.S. military and for NASA.”

County GIS personnel have to be within 3,000 feet of the aircraft and ensure visual contact at all times. Since the plane has no onboard pilot, "see and avoidance" has to be accomplished via the ground crew.

“Geography is playing a larger role in the decision making process nationwide,” Armstrong said. “Choosing sites, targeting market segments, planning distribution networks, responding to emergencies, or redrawing country boundaries all involve questions of geography.”

He said that GIS allows county employees to view, understand, question, interpret and visualize data in many ways.

In Otter Tail County, GIS started with advanced 911 addressing, a big benefit for first responders and others.

Orthorectified photography is vertical photography which has been corrected so that it’s true to scale and distortion free. Generally, photography is described as vertical, looking directly down from above.

“The orthorectified photographs are used for a multitude of applications, including town planning, environmental studies, engineering, farm management and so on,” Armstrong said. “The list is endless.”

This year the FAA is in design stages for new unmanned aerial

vehicle regulations. The Otter Tail County plane is not flying now but is expected to do so later this month when interim regulations are put into place.

Armstrong demonstrated the county plane to representatives from other counties during a GIS users group meeting in Fergus Falls.