Safe and Intelligent Surveying of Complex Environments with UAS Swarms

Accurate predictive and diagnostic meteorological tools serve a critical role in many military, civilian, and home defense applications. The micro-scale Three Dimensional Wind Field (3DWF) is a wind diagnostic model based primarily on the conservation of mass. Models like 3DWF meet an operational need by providing accurate diagnostics of the wind field in an urban or complex terrain environment and only requires minutes to execute. However, to obtain accurate wind diagnostics in complex environments, 3DWF requires initial condition wind data sampled at high spatiotemporal resolution. Efficiently obtaining this data in the past has been difficult due to non-mobile sensors, cost, and coarse sampling strategies. Barron Associates has developed a mobile sensor swarm which can provide distributed wind sampling in an urban environment. The vehicle sensor data will be used to initialize the 3DWF wind predictions.