System design of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for marine environmental sensing

Abstract

Technological improvements over the past decade have led to the widespread use of autonomous surface and underwater vehicles for data collection in marine environmental sensing and modeling in coastal environments. However, these vehicles and their sensors still have limitations, especially when tasked with observing highly dynamic or transient processes. We investigate the application of a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to the study of two such phenomena: Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) and thermal plumes. A complete field-operable system was developed to identify and characterize HAB events through a human-monitored supervisory control system. This capability was extended with an infrared imaging camera for remote sensing of thermal plumes, enabling future work to augment the in-situ measurements of surface craft with thermal imagery from a UAV. Experiments in Singapore have led to the successful identification and subsequent study of algal blooms on multiple occasions and demonstrated the potential for observation and modeling of thermal plumes.