Design Considerations for Remote Sensing Payloads on Inexpensive Unmanned Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (original) (raw)
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The Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Remote Sensing Systems
Sensors, 2020
This paper describes the possibility of using a small autonomous helicopter to perform tasks using a remote sensing system. This article further shows the most effective way to properly set up autopilot and to process its validation during flight tests. The most important components of the remote sensing system are described and the possibilities of using this system to monitor gas transmission and distribution networks are presented.
Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have evolved rapidly over the past decade driven primarily by military uses, and have begun finding application among civilian users for earth sensing reconnaissance and scientific data collection purposes. Among UAS, promising characteristics are long flight duration, improved mission safety, flight repeatability due to improving autopilots, and reduced operational costs when compared to manned aircraft. The potential advantages of an unmanned platform, however, depend on many factors, such as aircraft, sensor types, mission objectives, and the current UAS regulatory requirements for operations of the particular platform. The regulations concerning UAS operation are still in the early development stages and currently present significant barriers to entry for scientific users. In this article we describe a variety of platforms, as well as sensor capabilities, and identify advantages of each as relevant to the demands of users in the scientific research sector. We also briefly discuss the current state of regulations affecting UAS operations, with the purpose of informing the scientific community about this developing technology whose potential for revolutionizing natural science observations is similar to those transformations that GIS and GPS brought to the community two decades ago.
Small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are often suited to applications where the cost, resolution, and (or) operational inflexibility of conventional remote sensing platforms is limiting. Remote sensing with small UASs is still relatively new, and there is limited understanding of how the data are acquired and used for scientific purposes and decision making. This paper provides practical guidance about the opportunities and limitations of small UAS-based remote sensing by highlighting a small sample of scientific and commercial case studies. Case studies span four themes: (i) mapping, which includes case studies to measure aggregate stockpile volumes and map river habitat; (ii) feature detection, which includes case studies on grassland image classification and detection of agricultural crop infection; (iii) wildlife and animal enumeration, with case studies describing the detection of fish concentrations during a major salmon spawning event, and cattle enumeration at a concentrat...
Journal of Unmanned Vehicle Systems, 2014
Small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are often suited to applications where the cost, resolution, and (or) operational inflexibility of conventional remote sensing platforms is limiting. Remote sensing with small UASs is still relatively new, and there is limited understanding of how the data are acquired and used for scientific purposes and decision making. This paper provides practical guidance about the opportunities and limitations of small UAS-based remote sensing by highlighting a small sample of scientific and commercial case studies. Case studies span four themes: (i) mapping, which includes case studies to measure aggregate stockpile volumes and map river habitat; (ii) feature detection, which includes case studies on grassland image classification and detection of agricultural crop infection; (iii) wildlife and animal enumeration, with case studies describing the detection of fish concentrations during a major salmon spawning event, and cattle enumeration at a concentrated animal feeding operation; (iv) landscape dynamics with a case study of arctic glacier change. Collectively, these case studies only represent a fraction of possible remote sensing applications using small UASs, but they provide insight into potential challenges and outcomes, and help clarify the opportunities and limitations that UAS technology offers for remote sensing of the environment.
Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Low-Altitude Aerial Surveys
Journal of Wildlife Management, 2010
Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are proposed as a useful alternative to manned aircraft for some aerial wildlife surveys. We described the components and current capabilities of a small UAS developed specifically for wildlife and ecological surveys that is currently in field use for a variety of applications. We also reviewed government regulations currently affecting the use of UASs in civilian airspace. Information on capabilities and regulations will be valuable for agencies and individuals interested in the potential UASs offer for monitoring wildlife populations and their habitat. Descriptions of current uses and recommendations for future employment will be helpful in implementing this technology efficiently for aerial surveys as the civilian sector begins to adopt UASs for peacetime missions.
Advances in Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2009
resolution and hour-level temporal resolution) from low altitudes with less interference from clouds. Small UAVs combined with ground and orbital sensors can even form a multi-scale remote sensing system. UAVs equipped with imagers have been used in several agricultural remote sensing applications for collecting aerial images. High resolution red-green-blue (RGB) aerial photos can be used to determine the best harvest time of wine grapes ]. Multispectral images are also shown to be potentially useful for monitoring the ripeness of coffee ]. Water management is still a new area for UAVs, but it has more exact requirements than other remote sensing applications: real-time management of water systems requires more and more precise information on water, soil and plant conditions, for example, than most surveillance applications. Most current UAV remote sensing applications use large and expensive UAVs with heavy cameras (in the range of a kilogram). Images from reconfigurable bands taken simultaneously can increase the final information content of the imagery and significantly improve the flexibility of the remote sensing process. Motivated by the above remote sensing problem, AggieAir, a band-configurable small UASbased remote sensing system has been developed in steps at Center for Self Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS) together with Utah Water Research Lab (UWRL), Utah State University. The objective of this chapter is to present an overview of the ongoing research on this topic. The chapter first presents a brief overview of the unmanned aircraft systems focusing on the base of the whole system: autopilots. The common UAS structure is introduced. The hardware and software aspects of the autopilot control system are then explained. Different types of available sensor sets and autopilot control techniques are summarized. Several typical commercial off-the-shelf and open source autopilot packages are compared in detail, including the Kestrel autopilot from Procerus, Piccolo autopilot from CloudCap, and the Paparazzi open source autopilot etc. The chapter then introduces AggieAir, a small and low-cost UAS for remote sensing. Ag-gieAir comprises of a flying-wing airframe as the test bed, the OSAM-Paparazzi autopilot for autonomous navigation, the Ghost Foto image system for image capture, the Paparazzi ground control station (GCS) for real time monitoring, and the gRAID software for image processing. AggieAir is fully autonomous, easy to manipulate, and independent of a runway. AggieAir can carry embedded cameras with different wavelength bands, which are low-cost but have high spatial resolution. These imagers mounted on UAVs can form a camera array to perform multi-spectral imaging with reconfigurable bands, depending on the objectives of the mission. Developments of essential subsystems, such as the UAV autopilot, imaging payload subsystem, and image processing subsystem, are introduced in detail together with some experimental results to show the orthorectification accuracy. Several typical example missions together with real UAV flight test results are focused in Sec.3 including land survey, water area survey, riparian applications and remote data collection. Aerial images and stitched maps showed the effectiveness of the whole system. The future direction is more accurate orthorectification method and band-reconfigurable multi-UAV-based cooperative remote sensing for real-time water management and distributed irrigation control.
Hardin and Jensen (2011) presented six challenges to using small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) for environmental remote sensing: challenge of the hostile flying environment, challenge of power, challenge of available sensors, challenge of payload weight, challenge of data analysis, and challenge of regulation. Eight years later we revisit each of the challenges in the context of the current sUAS environment. We conclude that technological advances made in the interim (as applied to environmental remote sensing) have either (1) improved practitioner ability to respond to a challenge or (2) decreased the magnitude of the challenge itself. However, relatively short flight time remains a primary challenge to using sUAS in environmental remote sensing.
Development of an Autonomous Aerial Reconnaissance System at Georgia Tech
The Georgia Tech aerial robotics team has developed a system to compete in the International Aerial Robotics Competition, organized by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems, International. The team is a multi-disciplinary group of students who have developed a multi-year strategy to complete all levels and the overall mission. The approach taken to achieve the objectives of the required missions has evolved to incorporate new ideas and lessons learned. This document summarizes the approach taken, the current status of the project, and the design of the components and subsystems.
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for environmental applications special issue preface
International Journal of Remote Sensing, 2018
This special issue on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for Environmental Applications makes three important contributions: (1) It marks the launch of a new section in the International Journal of Remote Sensing (IJRS), which we have called Drones. (2) It captures key contributions from the 5 th Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) for Environmental Research (UAS4Enviro2017) conference, which was held at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal, from 28 to 30 of June 2017. (3) It collects a wide range of papers on UAS, in addition to those presented at the conference. Drones are indeed a key new technology for remote sensing, and one that has grown rapidly in recent years. According to the database, Web of Science (published by Clarivate Analytics), the first significant use in IJRS of any of the terms UAS, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drones, for example, in the title, abstract, or keyword of an article, was in 2009, in a paper by Dunford et al. (2009). It was not until 2012 that another paper used one of those terms. After that, the numbers increased very quickly, and by 2017, IJRS published 68 papers that referenced these terms. Most notably, 2017 also saw the first IJRS special issue on UAS, titled 'Unmanned aerial vehicles for environmental applications' (The Editors 2017). This current special issue is a direct follow-on from that major collection of papers, and the fact that we are able to have two major special issues on this topic in the space of just over one year, is further evidence of its importance. By placing UAS papers in the new Drones section of IJRS, we aim to foster dialogue amongst the UAS community, and highlight the rapid advances made in this field. However, the need for a separate section for drone-related work may not seem CONTACT Anita Simic Milas