The ASAPS Observing System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Under contract with the United States Air Force, PEMDAS^¨ Technologies and Innovations designed, developed and tested the Atmospheric Sensing and Prediction System (ASAPS^¨) sensor for use on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. ASAPS provides in-situ airborne environmental measurements of key environmental parameters and then streams those data to the ground control station in real-time. The ASAPS^¨ display software then presents the information in real time to the UAV operator and simultaneously pushes the in-situ measurements to a PEMDAS data assimilation system in a cloud server environment for additional processing. PEMDAS performed incremental testing of ASAPS by first integrating the sensor system on the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven aircraft. Under a separate contract with the United States Navy, PEMDAS further developed the ASAPS^¨ sensing system to fly onboard the Boeing Insitu ScanEagle aircraft. This presentation will present results of ASAPS^¨ testing and use during a joint Navy-NOAA field campaign off the coast of Barrow, Alaska during which the ASAPS^¨ sensor was flown onboard a US Navy ScanEagle. ASAPS^¨ sensor data is evaluated for accuracy and the utility of an UAV observing platform is examined.