This paper presents a passive cloud detection system on-board of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Clouds are to be avoided especially by lightweight UAVs to ensure structural health, as their presence indicate weather phenomena like turbulences and icing. For larger airplanes, local weather observation is traditionally achieved by weather radar. Since such active sensors with their high energy consumption and mass cannot be used on-board lightweight UAVs, the proposed cloud detection system is based on a passive imaging sensor in the visual spectrum (EO) and computer vision methods. For this work a High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite (HAPS) serves as example platform. Due to its relatively low airspeed and maneuverability, reactive maneuvers are best to be avoided. For ascent and descent through cloud layers therefore, a sufficiently large cloud-free corridor has to be identified beforehand. This is achieved by utilizing two modes of operation, which are described in this paper. The steps are demonstrated in a virtual environment example with focus on mapping and integration of the gathered information into a general weather situation map.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    A passive cloud detection system for UAV: Weather situation mapping with imaging sensors


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2017-03-01


    Size :

    928137 byte




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    High Altitude Navigation with Passive Imaging Sensors

    Lin, C.-F. / Politopoulos, A. / AIAA | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1994


    High altitude navigation with passive imaging sensors

    Lin, Ching-Fang / Politopoulos, Tasso | AIAA | 1994


    Detection of land mines with passive IR and mmW imaging sensors

    Nivelle, F.C. / Lhomme, P. | Tema Archive | 1997


    Situation Awareness in Marginal Weather Conditions

    Dyck, J. L. / Gilson, R. D. / Center for Applied Human Factors in Aviation | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1994


    Passive micro-optics sensors for 3D imaging

    Javidi, Bahram / Frauel, Yann | SPIE | 2004