Hah, I'm trying to get better at attention grabbing titles.
This is partly true though ... for my day job I work at the U of MN AEM UAV lab. Part of my job duties is to act as chief test pilot for our various lab projects. Ironically, this means doing less and less as we automate our systems and flight testing process more and more. In fact, the main job of a professional [UAS] test pilot is to *never* do anything exciting.
One of our projects involves doing survey work with the MN dept. of agriculture and DNR looking for an invasive (devastatingly invasive) plant species called oriental bittersweet. The hope is that if we can detect and map out infested areas using 'drones', then we can help the ground crews work more efficiently as they go into an area to treat it. And also we can evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment in subsequent years. For our use-case we want to gather as much detail as possible ... this means flying the highest quality camera/lens we can get at the lowest altitude possible (primarily limited by terrain/obstacles, and how fast we can snap pictures.) Anyway, I wrote up a totally boring blog post comparing the imagery we get from a commercial DJI Phantom, compared to the imagery we get from our in-house system (An X-UAV Talon, Sony a6000 mirrorless camera, 30mm prime lens, and in-house developed autopilot/flight control system and ground station.)
Prepare to be totally bored if you go visit this link, nothing exciting here, please move along folks!
http://gallinazo.flightgear.org/uas/dji ... ony-a6000/