Safe and Intelligent Surveying of Complex Environments with UAS Swarms

Barron Associates proposes development of the micro-Swarm Environmental Sensing (SENS) technology to safely and efficiently gather high spatiotemporal resolution wind data to initialize diagnostic wind models. SENS includes UAV platforms instrumented with meteorological sensors and swarm / path planning software to coordinate behaviors amongst multiple vehicles. SENS fills an important need in modeling wind flow through urban environments. Accurate diagnostic tools serve a critical role in many military, civilian, and home defense applications. Micro-scale diagnostic models fill an important operation need as they have low computational requirements and can execute on hand-held devices making them an invaluable asset for field and mobile operations. Studies have shown that accurate initialization data increases the accuracy of such models, particularly in urban environments and complex terrain. The evaluation and the improvement of urban flow models rely on the observations of flows and turbulence from flows near ground level to the RSL at high spatiotemporal resolution. Swarms of UAVs developed with SENS technology have the potential to capture these observations, and will be instructed to target information-rich areas. These areas consist, for example, of areas with large spatial gradients in wind shear and temperature that are important in generating or destructing turbulence kinetic energy.