The circular shape of Unicamp, with streets that converge at a central point for the meeting of people and ideas, shone in the aerial images released in recent weeks by Computer Science (IC) student Lucas Rodolfo de Castro Moura. The photos and videos were produced with a drone, which flew over the campus at an altitude of 120 meters and showed faculties and institutes from a hitherto unprecedented perspective. What started as a joke had such an impact that it became a business and launches its website this Friday (11). LRDrone.
“The first time I saw a drone like this one, I was impressed. I didn’t know that we had already reached this level of technology commercially”, says Moura. When the opportunity arose, the student purchased the equipment and began flying around Cidade Universitária, a neighborhood around Unicamp, where he lives. The images, posted on his personal Facebook page, quickly spread and brought people interested in his work.
“I posted two photos and a video in a Unicamp group, and it went viral. They received more than a thousand likes and reached more than 15 thousand people organically, without any type of investment in media”, she reports. Seeing the potential of the images and the high investment he had made in the equipment, the student invited his friend Heitor Raymundo, also an IC student, to optimize production, create a website and structure the business.
According to Raymundo, the night photo of Unicamp, the duo's biggest success, was taken almost by chance. He says that they were filming Estrada da Rhodia and, as they hadn't gotten any good images, they decided to do a 360 degree turn with the drone and saw Unicamp. “That photo appeared on the screen. We had never seen Unicamp from that angle at night. The photo was a hit,” she says. In addition to the images from Unicamp, LRDrone took surprising images of the city of Campinas, its roads and fields.
"The drone It’s a new technology with few people investing here in Campinas, and the demand is great: construction companies, events, weddings”, says Moura. Operated by remote control with a cell phone attached, your equipment can fly up to 65 km/h and 500 meters of altitude, in a diameter of 7 kilometers and shows what it sees on the screen. “On the cell phone, we have a view of the camera and control the aperture and exposure time to capture images. We also see all the flight data, such as altitude and wind speed,” she explains.
The camera is less than 4 centimeters and captures images in 4k (4 kilopixels per image line), resolution almost 4 times better than HD. It is fixed to the bottom of the structure of the drone by an extremely sensitive mechanism called gimbal, which stabilizes the image during flight.
O drone It has several sensors that allow it to avoid accidents autonomously. If it detects, for example, that the battery is running low for the return journey, it takes control and returns to where it left. The sensors also identify obstacles and wind speed and avoid or land. “His software is very developed, and the integration between hardware and software is incredible”, says the student.
