A low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle with towed miniature atomic magnetometer array

The Navy seeks to deploy sensitive atomic magnetometers on small, inexpensive UAVs that deploy from a sonobuoy tube. There are three primary challenges with this approach: First, existing magnetometer systems are too large to fit on a typical tube-launched UAV. Second, sources of magnetic noise such as the motor are close to the sensors and have the potential to overwhelm the sensors. Third, existing UAVs are built using magnetic materials that can degrade the performance of the magnetometers. This proposal describes a development program to solve this engineering challenge: First, Use Twinleaf"s new SAM-2 atomic magnetometer system that has been uniquely designed to fit on a sonobuoy-launched UAV when it becomes available in 2013. Second, implement magnetic noise and heading error compensation algorithms in the SAM-2 control unit that were first developed in Phase I of this project. Design and integrate sensors on a Latitude Engineering low-magnetic-noise Non-Articulating Magnetic Anomaly Detection NAMAD UAV design that is uniquely suited to fly magnetic field sensors.