Safe and Intelligent Surveying of Complex Environments with UAS Swarms

Barron Associates has been selected for award of an Air Force Phase I SBIR contract to develop the micro-Swarm Environmental Sensing (µSENS) technology to safely and efficiently gather high spatiotemporal resolution wind data to initialize diagnostic wind models. µSENS includes UAV platforms instrumented with meteorological sensors and swarm / path planning software to coordinate behaviors amongst multiple vehicles. µSENS 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 operational need as they have low computational requirements and can execute on hand-held devices, making them an invaluable asset for field and mobile operations. Swarms of UAVs developed with µSENS technology will capture accurate wind observations used to initialize the diagnostic models, thereby increasing the accuracy of these models.