Unmanned Air Vehicles for Coastal and Environmental Research

In the last decade we have witnessed an unprecedented development of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) for missions with high societal impact. Future generations of UAV systems will reflect the major current trends: increased levels of autonomy, lower cost, longer endurance, and networking capabilities. Networking is one of the major trends for unmanned vehicle systems; it is also one of the enabling technologies for distributed cooperation (and computation). In mobile network systems, vehicles, sensors and operators interact through (inter-operated) communication networks. Dynamic networks of UAVs can be used in a broad range of missions like border patrol, tracking of pollution at sea, and oceanographic and environmental research. The Portuguese Air Force Academy and the School of Engineering at Porto University have been collaborating, since 2006, on the design, implementation and testing of different types of UAVs to demonstrate these technologies in a wide spectrum of military/civil missions. This is a multi-disciplinary cooperation encompassing several technological fields: advanced vision systems for identification and tracking of fixed and mobile features, cooperative control of teams of UAVs in mixed-initiative environments, sensor fusion and navigation systems. These technologies are being developed and integrated into UAV platforms for demonstration in military missions like reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, and also in several civil missions like aerial gravimetry, aerial photography, surveillance and control of maritime traffic, fishing surveillance, and detection and control of coastal hazards. This paper reports on these developments and on the demonstrations that took place in the last two years. We report on video surveillance and environmental monitoring operations with six different types of fixed-wing UAVs (wingspans ranging from I to 6 meters), with autonomous take-off and landing capabilities. The smaller platforms can be easily deployed (hand-launched) while the others are more suitable for endurance and larger payloads.