Dr. Nils C. Prieur

Dr. Nils C. Prieur

ML Engineer / Earth & Planetary Scientist

First Drone test: finding a location in the bay area is…. not easy!

1 minute read

Published:

Hey folks! Before I jump into fieldwork, I need to get comfortable with my new drone. That means finding a spot for a test flight—easier said than done in the Bay Area! Drones are only allowed in uncontrolled airspace (Class G), and with major airports like SF and Oakland nearby, plus a bunch of smaller ones, Class G airspace is as rare as a unicorn.

I scouted the hills southwest of Stanford, hoping for a quiet field. But between protected wildlife areas and private properties wrapped in barbed wire, my luck ran out. After a few car trips and a lot of Googling, I stumbled upon Baylands Park. Although it’s not technically in Class G and sits suspiciously close to SF airport, it came highly recommended by the drone community. Fingers crossed, I decided to give it a go. And wow, what an experience! After setting up on a big grassy field, I got the drone ready. Drawing a flight path on the controller screen was surprisingly intuitive. Once everything was set, I hit the magic button, and the drone took off, flew its route, and landed all by itself. Super smooth! I just had to keep an eye on the battery, which drains faster than you’d think, and make sure the drone stayed within range.

Next up: processing the images. Drones capture a ton of data, and I used Metashape Pro, a fantastic tool available in Mathieu’s lab, to stitch the images together into an orthoimage. These geo-referenced images can be imported straight into GIS software like QGIS—an absolute game-changer for my workflow.

Fieldwork is right around the corner, but before that, I’ll present my preliminary results at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March. It’ll be great to get some feedback and fine-tune my process. Until then, peace out and take care! 😊

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Transition to YOLOv8, always improving the algorithm, collecting more labels…

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Bonjour, everyone! Time feels like it’s slipping away faster than ever these days. With paternity leave in full swing, finding work hours here and there has been a challenge (and honestly, it’s hard not to get distracted by Baby Finn’s cuteness). Despite the chaos, I’ve managed to make a major leap forward in the project: transitioning from Detectron2 Mask R-CNN to YOLOv8. Let me tell you—it’s been a game-changer.

First manuscript accepted! Moving back to Norway after two years in the US

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Let’s go!!! 🎉 After nearly two years of hard work, my first article for the BOULDERING project has been accepted in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets! You can check it out here. This has been a long road, but also an incredibly rewarding one. Over 33,000 boulders were collected across more than 750 tiles/images from three planetary bodies: Earth, Mars, and the Moon.

Wifey at Stanford now! Baby Boss incoming in September

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Big life updates, everyone! Siri is now at Stanford! Thanks to a fantastic program from the Norwegian Research Council (NRC), postdocs already involved in NRC projects can apply for a research stay abroad for up to a year. The NRC covers the salary, and with a high success rate for these grants, it’s a great way to build international collaborations. After some searching, Siri found a group at Stanford doing work closely related to her research at NMBU in Ås. A few weeks of visa wrangling later, she’s here!