Dr. Blake Allan
Chief Remote Pilot
Education
PhD, Deakin University, Australia, 2017
Biography & Research Interests
Blake completed his PhD at Deakin University in 2017. His thesis explored refining technology to examine animal movement in modified landscapes. While technically based on terrestrial mammals (possums), we try not to hold that against him, and Blake is being slowly converted into a marine ecologist. Blake describes himself as a technoecologist, focusing his research on emerging technologies, and how they can be integrated into the collection and analysis of environment variables.
Blake is both the Chief Remote Pilot and Maintenance Controller for Deakin University’s RPAS operations (otherwise known as UAVs or Drones), and within the marine mapping group. Blake has over 350 hours flying both fixed-wing and multirotor RPAS, and is knowledgeable in the construction and tuning of commercial unmanned airframes.
Deakin’s fleet of airframes involves various fixed-wing and multirotor aircraft, and is growing rapidly to accommodate the various different sensor arrays used in marine research, including RGB photos and video, calibrated multispectral imagery, and thermal imagery.
As may be presumed from his roles as Chief Remote Pilot, Blake specializes in capture and processing of UAV imagery. Blake is also heavily involved in photogrammetry, spatial statistics, geographic information systems (GIS), species distribution modelling, and volumetrics.