CU Boulder researchers lead team using drone technology to map soil moisture – Boulder Daily Camera

Pilot Dan Hesselius holds a fixed-wing SuperSwift drone. (University of Colorado / Courtesy photo)

University of Colorado Boulder students and faculty make the claim that they have likely flown more research drones in more places in the world than any university in the country.

Their next destination is the skies over Yuma farm country.

CU announced Friday that in coming weeks, its scientists, engineers and students are teaming up with Boulder's Black Swift Technologies to use unmanned aircraft to measure water moisture at a Yuma test irrigation farm.

Project Drought, as it's known, is one of five different research initiatives under CU's Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing project, under the direction of Professor Brian Argrow at CU's Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences department.

CU considers IRISS to be a pillar of the university's Grand Challenge initiative efforts to harness science, technology and innovation to solve important national or global problems.

Argrow said Friday that work starting soon at the Irrigation Research Foundation research and demonstration farm in northeast Colorado is a continuation of a project that is ongoing.

"This project has been going on for a couple of years and one of the issues for this iteration of the sensor and the aircraft is to make sure the sensor and aircraft work together as a system, and that the flight system in the aircraft doesn't interfere with making those precision measurements," he said. "Those are the types of issues being worked on right now."

Black Swift Technologies, which was spun out of CU by aerospace doctoral graduates Jack Elston, Maciej Stachura and Cory Dixon aided by a NASA Small Business Innovative Research Grant developed the fixed-wing SuperSwift drone equipped with a removable nose cone that will fly over the test farm.

The drone's sensor was developed by a team led by CU Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering Professor Al Gasiewski.

The research team will pair high-precision drone readings of soil moisture with measurements from NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive Satellite, launched in 2015. The satellite's primary radar instrument has failed, but scientists can still use its passive radiometer instrument to produce surface maps. Each pixel represents an area about 225 miles across, according to Argrow.

The IRF facility in Yuma is equipped with sensors in the soil to chart moisture, and that data will be compared with data gathered from the air by the SuperSwift drone. According to Dixon, each team will include a pilot on the ground, a staff member and two students.

"This is part of a project with Black Swift Technologies, so we are talking about a potential for commercialization of this capability," Argrow said. "You can envision that ultimately, this soil moisture mapping can be provided as a service.

"The emphasis is not on county scale drought measurement, like you get from NASA mapping, but farm scale. You can imagine farmers wanting to use this service to improve their water management, by informing them on the soil moisture distributions."

Dixon, in a news release, said, "While some farmers don't have the ability to adequately assess their soil moisture, we can fly over an entire crop field with high enough resolution to give them data that will eventually allow for more efficient water use in particular areas."

Argrow hedged only slightly on CU's claim to drone supremacy at the university level in the U.S.

"That's quite a claim," he conceded. "We're throwing down the gauntlet, so I guess I'll let somebody tell us we're wrong."

Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan

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CU Boulder researchers lead team using drone technology to map soil moisture - Boulder Daily Camera