Terrain Ruggedness Pathfinder

Finding the easiest route up a mountain.

There’s a known wingsuit location in Washington that a buddy and I had the desire to jump. Getting to this exit point requires 7hrs of hiking. The mountain has no trail to its peak and there’s no trail that crosses any section of its slopes. The hike from the landing area is 1.5hrs of hiking and pathfinding back to the closest accessible road, again with no trail.

Topo maps give a fairly good indication of the elevation gain of a hike and the route you should take up the mountain, but we wanted to make sure we optimized our route to avoid pitfalls that the topo might not highlight, and to follow the least rugged terrain. To solve this problem I used 1/3 arc-second elevation data (roughly 10m resolution) of the area and built a terrain ruggedness index to identify areas of highly rugged terrain to avoid. I then applied an A* path finding algorithm on the dataset to optimize the route for the least rugged path up the mountain.

There are still a few kinks to work out to apply this to other locations, though we only had to route around a single boulder wall by traversing maybe 100ft out of our way, so I would say it was a fairly successful approach. The data in this location is almost as beautiful as being there in real life.

Helmet Embedded Altimeter

Constant Altitude Awareness

The primary thing that skydivers are required to be aware of at all times is their altitude. In various disciplines such as freeflying and wingsuiting the standard wrist mounted altimeter can be hard to see. Skydivers in these disciplines often use audible altimeters which play a tone but give no visual feedback. These audible altimeters are also only capable of notifying the skydiver as they approach their deployment and emergency altitudes. They do not have any affordance for maintaining awareness throughout the majority of the skydive. My helmet embedded altimeter fits inside the right or left audible pocket in most skydiving helmets and places a 1.8” display in the corner of the user’s peripheral vision. The display shows the current altitude which can be read at a glance without a change in body position which might adversely effect the skydiver’s flight attitude.By combining a GPS and microSD card slot, the altimeter also give athletes the ability to analyze their performance by graphing their vertical airspeed, horizontal track, and glide ratio once they are on the ground.

Parts Used:

• 328 3.3v/16MHz Pro Mini
• 328 5v/16MHz Pro Mini
• 1.8” TFT Color Display (SPI Interface)
• BMP085 BOSCH ATMEL Digital Barometric Pressure Sensor
• 66 channel w/10Hz update GPS unit