Iowa Low-Altitude Remote Sensing Lab
I-LARS is a research lab housed in the Department of Geography at the University of Northern Iowa. The lab was founded by Prof. Patrick Pease in 2015 to take advantage of the rapidly growing unmanned aerial system industry for environmental research and establish the University of Northern Iowa as a leader in unmanned aerial system teaching. The original platform is our beloved EBee Ag. In 2016, the DJI Inspire 1 Pro was added to the fleet. The current director of the lab, James Dietrich, was hired in 2017 to lead I-LARS and grow the Geography Department’s UAS class offerings. Prof. Dietrich’s arrival also came with a big expansion in the fleet of aerial platforms with the addition of the DJI Phantom’s (3 & 4) and the DJI Matrice 600.
The focus of I-LARS is to leverage the high-resolution aerial imagery that we can gather from our aerial platforms for environmental research and monitoring. This can range from simple high-resolution aerial mapping to multi-spectral mapping and complex 3D change detection. We use a variety of techniques for collecting our imagery depending on the project. Our processing workflows are based on Structure-from-Motion Multi-view stereo photogrammetry (SfM-MVS) with both commercial and open-source software. For examples of our work check out the gallery below, our Project page, our Facebook page, and our YouTube playlist.
I-LARS is licensed to fly by the US Federal Aviation Administration for commercial/research purposes under 14 CFR Part 107.
Project Inquiries:
State agencies/academic – Please contact James Dietrich from the “People” page to discuss your project
Commercial inquires – at this time we are not setup to be “hired” to do commercial drone tasks (e.g. Real estate photography, site inspections/mapping)
The focus of I-LARS is to leverage the high-resolution aerial imagery that we can gather from our aerial platforms for environmental research and monitoring. This can range from simple high-resolution aerial mapping to multi-spectral mapping and complex 3D change detection. We use a variety of techniques for collecting our imagery depending on the project. Our processing workflows are based on Structure-from-Motion Multi-view stereo photogrammetry (SfM-MVS) with both commercial and open-source software. For examples of our work check out the gallery below, our Project page, our Facebook page, and our YouTube playlist.
I-LARS is licensed to fly by the US Federal Aviation Administration for commercial/research purposes under 14 CFR Part 107.
Project Inquiries:
State agencies/academic – Please contact James Dietrich from the “People” page to discuss your project
Commercial inquires – at this time we are not setup to be “hired” to do commercial drone tasks (e.g. Real estate photography, site inspections/mapping)
