The Aerosonde Robotic Aircraft: A New Paradigm for Environmental Observations

Abstract

The Aerosonde is a small robotic aircraft designed for highly flexible and inexpensive operations. Missions are conducted in a completely robotic mode, with the aircraft under the command of a ground controller who monitors the mission. Here we provide an update on the Aerosonde development and operations and expand on the vision for the future, including instrument pay loads, observational strategies, and platform capabilities. The aircraft was conceived in 1992 and developed to operational status in 1995-98, after a period of early prototyping. Continuing field operations and development since 1998 have led to the Aerosonde Mark 3, with ~2000 flight hours completed. A defined development path through to 2002 will enable the aircraft to become increasingly more robust with increased flexibility in the range and type of operations that can be achieved. An Aerosonde global reconnaissance facility is being developed that consists of launch and recovery sites dispersed around the globe. The use of satellite communications and internet technology enables an operation in which all aircraft around the globe are under the command of a single center. During operation, users will receive data at their home institution in near-real time via the virtual field environment, allowing the user to update the mission through interaction with the global command center. Sophisticated applications of the Aerosonde will be enabled by the development of a variety of interchangeable instrument payloads and the operation of Smart Aerosonde Clusters that allow a cluster of Aerosondes to interact intelligently in response to the data being collected.

New Setup of the UAS ALADINA for Measuring Boundary Layer Properties, Atmospheric Particles and Solar Radiation

“…The new setup of ALADINA (Application of Light-weight Aircraft for Detecting in situ Aerosols) in the context of the ongoing development is provided as an introduction to the current modifications. The first applications date back to several decades ago [1]; later, some UAS applications of atmospheric research groups were reported in the 1990s [2]. Compared to these first meteorological applications, there has been a revolution concerning the functionality, size and complexity of even commercially available airborne systems, autopilots and the corresponding hardware and software.…”

Observations of the atmosphere and surface state over Terra Nova Bay, Antarctica, using unmanned aerial systems

“…The Aerosonde ® UAS is a small (3.6 m wingspan, 19-21 kg takeoff weight), robotic, pusher-prop aircraft designed to undertake a wide range of operations in a highly flexible and inexpensive mode (see Table 1 for the specifications of the Aerosonde ® UAS). The Aerosonde ® UAS has proven to be capable of carrying a variety of instrument packages (Holland et al, 2001) and to perform well under polar winter conditions in the Arctic (Inoue and Curry, 2004;Inoue et al, 2008) and the Antarctic (Cassano et al, 2010;Knuth et al, 2013). The relatively fast flight speed for a small UAS allows the Aerosonde ® UAS to operate in strong winds, which are a frequent feature of the Terra Nova Bay region.…”

A Multi-rotor System for the Collection and Analysis of Measurements to Evaluate and Spatially Demonstrate the Pollutants in the Air

“…There have, however, been a couple of meteorological experiments involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [7,8,9]. The advantage of these UAVs is that it is possible to perform the measurements along previously defined spatial coordinates.…”