Amanda Meys at presenting at CSIRO’s Young Future Shapers program. Credit: Amanda Meys
Drones have emerged as a critical tool used by scientists to carry out research, expanding capabilities to monitor biodiversity within ecosystems and deliver fertiliser for precision agriculture.
But, while members of the Australian public, for better or worse, can send a drone into the air as soon as they purchase it, getting the go-ahead to use drones for research is a little more complicated.
“To be able to operate drones across CSIRO, we have to have a CASA-approved operating certificate. And, as part of that, you need to have a Chief Remote Pilot,” Amanda Meys, Chief Remote Pilot of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, told Cosmos.
Meys oversees all drone-related tasks at CSIRO to ensure everything is carried out in compliance with Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) – from approving jobs, to training remote pilots to become licensed operators, and testing and re-checking flying proficiencies.
“We’ve got drones that range from about 50g – they fly indoors, like tiny, little handheld ones – our largest drone is 101kg maximum take-off weight,” she says.
“Part of my responsibility as an extension of CASA is making sure that they [remote pilots] can fly safely.”
CSIRO got the ball rolling to incorporate drones as tools in its research in 2019.
“I was sort of involved from day one, even though I’d never flown a drone before I joined the project,” recalls Meys, who was as a CSIRO Safety Advisor at the time.
An avionics technician by trade, Meys began her career in the Royal Australian Army working on helicopters as a maintainer.
“That was working with radar, radio and electrical systems on military aircraft, and I did that for nearly 15 years,” Meys says. She later ensured aircraft were safe to fly as an aviation safety officer for the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) research and development unit.
By September 2020, Meys was selected to become the next Chief Remote Pilot – a role which takes her across all of CSIRO’s research units and the country.
Monitoring wildlife from above
According to Meys, one key CASA standard operating condition is “visual line-of-sight”.
“You must be able to see the drone with your own eyes … be able to orientate it with your own eyes, without binoculars,” explains Meys, “so the smaller the drone, the closer you fly [it] to yourself.”
This becomes especially important when planning and carrying out research involving animals, such as monitoring whales via drones piloted from nearby research vessels.
“[Researchers] have flown drones with petri dishes on them to try and catch the whale spout to see what’s in it,” says Meys.
“A boat can only go so close to the animal. The drone can only go so close to the animal for a certain time.
“You can’t fly a drone and just sit it on top of a whale and pretty much follow it around, because now you’re harassing the whale. So, you’ve got animal ethics considerations.”
Credit: Amanda Meys
Back on dry land, drones play a critical role in spotting cryptic wildlife which occur at low densities and broad distributions – such as koalas.
“It’s really easy to do at nighttime with the thermal camera. Because now you don’t actually have to fly right over the koala with a thermal camera. You can pick them up from 100m away … You just go, ‘yeah, there’s one in that tree. Move on’,” explains Meys.
According to a 2021 paper in CSIRO Publishing’sjournal Wildlife Research, drone thermal imaging technology detects the highest number of koalas per dollar spent compared to other field-based methods like systematic spotlighting and the spot-assessment technique.
But, Meys adds, flying a drone at night is another ballgame.
“I do the training for night flying and night flying proficiency. So it’s a whole new induction. It’s a whole new proficiency check,” she says.
“It’s interesting to fly at night in the sense that because you’ve got lights on the drone it’s easier to see the drone at nighttime. However, what you can’t see are the obstacles.
“So that’s where we come in and we start doing daylight site surveys. Where are all our obstacles in the daylight?”
Meys is also implementing CASA-approved “extended visual line-of-sight” procedures within CSIRO’s operating manual. In addition to the remote pilot operating the drone, this will allow trained observers to act as ‘spotters’ to extend the range at which drones can be flown.
“That now opens up greater areas, particularly when we’re trying to do stuff like ecological surveys, or biodiversity surveys.”
Precision agriculture and ecosystem monitoring
Drones also enable highly precise application of fertiliser research at the Australian Cotton Research Institute near Narrabri in New South Wales.
“They’re trying to determine how much fertiliser is required. So, they’ll spray one paddock with one fertiliser, and it might be a little bit more in the next paddock. They don’t want crossover because they’re trying to see exactly the optimum amount,” says Meys.
“We can get, you know, 20cm above a crop height. Precision agriculture, we’re now spraying exactly where we want to spray and there’s not a lot of drift.”
Drones also help reduce health and safety risks to researchers applying fertiliser in the summer heat during cotton’s growing season.
“Before they got the drone, they were getting in a full chemical suit and had a backpack with a chemical on the back, and they were hand pumping, walking through … in 45°C heat. That’s not pleasant.
“Now we use a drone, so the pilot can go and sit under a tree, and the drone can go out in the sun … Much more efficient, much more effective and a lot safer.”
Credit: CSIRO
Drones equipped with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) equipment, which uses lasers to measure distances, also enable ecological and biodiversity surveys at greater scales than before.
“We used to have guys that had LiDARs on the back of a ute, and they were trying to drive and take the same pictures. Now we can do it aerially, which is easier to stitch together. It’s also a lot more efficient at getting across the terrain.”
A critical part of Meys’ work is ensuring that CSIRO research carried out with drones complies with The Privacy Act 1988. This becomes especially important if a member of the public happens to wander into a publicly accessible field as it is being surveyed.
“We might inadvertently take a photo of somebody. So we’ve got procedures in place. If you see them come in you can go up to them, say, ‘hey, you were in the field I was just surveying, but you’re in one of the pictures. Are you okay with that?’” Meys explains.
“If we can’t get permission, we don’t use that photo and we just delete it.”
The future is drone ‘swarms’
Technical advancements have greatly extended drone capabilities in just the past 5 years, and Meys is excited to see what comes next.
“For a very long time, it would probably be unheard of that there was a 100kg drone flying around in the sky. So now the drones are getting bigger, the [battery] technology is getting better … We can now fly longer and further,” Meys says.
Looking to the future, she anticipates drone ‘swarming’ will become a big thing in agricultural research and ecological monitoring.
“What you can do is you have a lead drone and … a set of drones ‘slave’ to the first drone. So, particularly if you wanted to spray a big area, you could have 4 agricultural sprayers … doing 4 times the spray rate that you can do with one drone.”
Meys also expects to incorporate “beyond visual line-of-sight” procedures to allow remote pilots to fly drones at greater distances than ever before.
“You actually don’t need a spotter, because the drone technology is getting so good,” she explains.
“Drones can use ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) which provides real-time precision and shared situational awareness to crewed pilots and air traffic controllers.”