30/05/2019
Today we performed the second marine litter volume estimation experiment. Because the satellite Sentinel-2 was not scheduled to pass over the study area we could not deploy the buoyant targets and instead we prepared the submersible cube to gather data with our UAV. In total we repeated the experiment three times each one with different litter volumes. The first time we left the cube empty in order to gather reference data, the second time we put inside it 100 plastic bottles and 100 bottle labels, for the third repeat we doubled the volume with 200 plastic bottles and 200 labels in total.
The experiment began at approximately 11:00 am using the octacopter S1000. The UAV was mounted with a Sony RGB camera and the SlantRange sensor which is calibrated to match the Sentinel-2’s wavelength and bandwidth of the Blue, Green, Red and NIR bands.
