Making UAS Weather Intelligent with AERO

Developments and future applications for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) provide opportunities for advancing meteorological research and development, while also defining new requirements for nowcasting and forecasting data products. Developments include UAS that can fly further, carry larger payloads, and operate autonomously far outside of line of sight. Current and future applications include package delivery, surveillance and conducting remote site surveys. These advances and applications for UAS require systems that are ‘weather intelligent’, both planning and reacting autonomously to avoid weather related impacts or to optimize a flight for favorable conditions.

NextGen Federal Systems is developing the Autonomous Environmental Routing Onboard (AERO) system to enable UAS acting alone or as a ‘swarm’ to sense and react to weather related impacts, in-flight. The goal of AERO is to reduce these impacts on UAS to improve overall flight success rates. This technology provides an abstraction layer that can interface with various autopilot systems to provide the ability to ingest, sense and analyze meteorological data. To collect and analyze this data, our approach is modular and includes onboard communications, sensing and compute hardware. The data analysis results in the construction of gridded impact data for the UAS based on critical weather parameters (e.g., winds, turbulence, fog) and is then used to optimize the flight plan.

To increase the utility of AERO technology, innovations to microscale meteorology are critical. The ability to accurately conduct this level of detailed meteorology can be aided by the inclusion of UAS in-situ sensor readings that would be aggregated into forecasting models. AERO combined with advancements in meteorology will provide UAS with the weather intelligence capabilities needed to be successful in future applications.