Custom Cameras

This customer contacted Sentera with a desire to create a remote sensing system that could collect photographs from a drone that would accurately replicate nine spectral bands present on the Sentinel 2B satellite.  This system would allow them to collect data on demand, not at the liberty of satellite coverage schedules and cloud coverage, and apply models they had developed from years of Sentinel 2B crop data.  The spectral bands of interest spanned the majority of the visible spectrum and extended into short wave infrared (SWIR), shown in the following table.

Leveraging many existing building blocks, we were able to quickly and efficiently create a solution to meet their demand.  The final solution leveraged our Sentera Single Sensor hardware for the VIS-NIR bands, where each sensor was discretely filtered to match the desired spectral band, along with a precisely filtered SWIR camera core.  These camera cores were instrumented using existing Sentera power and data distribution hardware and a COTS single board computer for control.  The final sensor package was then integrated only a 3 axis gimbal and attached to a DJI M600 enterprise drone.

Requiring scalable multispectral data that could not be provided by any existing camera solution, this customer contacted us with aggressive remote sensing demands.  Specifically, they required a four-band multispectral camera capable of capturing all bands at a 5 Hz synchronized capture rate.  Further, the sensor needed to be global shutter, 5MP resolution minimum, with a ground sample distance (GSD) of less than 1cm at 200’ altitude, and meet size, weight and environmental constraints.

This project posed many challenges related to system architecture, data processing and storage transfer rates, optical design, environmental protection, cooling, as well as size and weight optimization.  We ultimately were able to provide a custom sensor solution that leveraged many of the architectural and design elements present in our 6X multispectral sensor.  The sensor met all requirements, sporting four 2/3”IMX265 monochrome global shutter sensors, a Xilinx Zynq FPGA, a 500GB solid state drive, and high quality optics and filters.  The final product features high resolution c mount lenses, a rugged aluminum enclosure with rugged push-pull connector ports, and weighs in at around 520 grams.  It has a companion incident light sensor and offers convenient I/O and mounting provisions for simple system integration.  This sensor has been flown on DJI M300 and M600 systems.