UNOLS Scientific Committee for Oceanographic Aircraft Research
2010 Ocean Sciences Meeting
Town Hall Session
Portland, OR
February 22, 2010
Meeting Minutes
Note: All appendices are in pdf format unless otherwise noted.
Appendices
Introduction by Dan Schwartz (University of Washington)
- There are a number of independent organizations using aircraft research – need to coordinate efforts
- Acknowledges Phil McGillivary, Vernon Asper, Jon Alberts, Erin Jackson, Tim Schnoor
- Announced sign up for SCOAR email list
- Need to coordinate efforts after 100 years of using ships and aircraft together in research
- SCOAR Acitivies 2009-2010 – June 11 Teleconference, Sept 15-16 Alaska UAS Interest Group, Nov 9 – 10 ICCAGRA, Feb Ocean Sciences Meeting
- Explanation of UNOLS – CIRPAS: first UNOLS facility for aircraft research
- Unmanned and manned aircraft – manned example: Twin Otter
- Still a role for larger manned aircraft
- Will hear more about innovative unmanned projects being developed
- Air (C-130) deployable coyote
- U Michigan facility
- Integration of small unmanned system from NOAA ship MacArthur
- What about a hybrid? UAS and Manned Aircraft…
Raja Sengupta (University of California, Berkeley) – collaborative UAC Control for Information Acquisition: ONR Sponsored Research at C3UV (also at meeting: William Hodge)
- “Brains” of the aircraft were on display for attendees
- Movie: unmanned aircraft flying over river
- No GPS coordinates being taken on aircraft, on board image processing, keeps looking for water and takes image – segregates water pixels and non water pixels
- Spirals out from initial gps coordinates to find water
- Once it lines itself up along river vector it doesn’t need gps coordinates any more
- Build interface where one person can control multiple aircraft to view many things over a large area
- Unmanned aircraft will autonomously make several passes to find desired location – can also do this with multiple aircraft – can communicate with each other via wifi and coordinate their actions
- Search, surveillance, location tasks
- Localize operations to a position of about 4 meters
- Basic lesson for community: telemetry coming from scan eagle and video coming from scan eagle are not time synchronized. Video time stamped on ground. Need geo referenced video for these operations.
Guy Meadows (University of Michigan) – Persistant Ocean Surveillance – Flying Fish
- Phase I vehicle underwent sea trials in 1998
- First fully autonomous flights to and from ocean surface
- Phase II – Balanced energy budget – electric/solar recharging 5/6 2010 sea trials.
- Missions: Persistant Ocean Surveillance Mission, Harmful Algal Bloom Mission, Oil Spill or Frontal Boundary Tracking, Possible Collaborative Missions, Possible AUV Missions
- This is a work in progress…
Greg Walker (University of Alaska) – Recent ScanEagle Ops in the Bering Sea
- Where does this fit in the civil sector? Airspace issues, pilot training issues, etc.
- Safe Airspace Integration, New payloads and processing, Enhancement Testing in field operations
- Airspace Use Studies – used historical data to show how many aircraft actually operate in the airfield area the ScanEagle is using, show FAA that ScanEagle is safe to fly – they were granted permission to operate within 5 miles of the ship
- Aircraft can survive icing
- Footprint fairly small
Tim Veenstra (Airborne Technologies, Inc.)
- Marine debris work led to small unmanned aircraft project
- Aircraft could deploy buoy once it locates debris
- Low cost - $15,000 airframe, easy op, vessel or land-based, satellite tracking, flight and ground control software (most open source)
Dan Schwartz – Video: Controlled Towed Vehicle (CTV) on CIRPAS Twin Otter