Field Notes

Don’t know whhhhhy there’s no plane up in the sky, stormy weather, wind’s been staying high, since forever Ok so I’m not exactly a songwriting genius. The AMF is the small complex of containerss with the radars on the roof. This is our base of operations for the two-week campaign...

A small team from RECUV (Gijs DeBoer, Doug Weibel, Tevis Nichols and Phillip D’amore) arrived in the arctic on April 2nd for a two-week campaign for the Evaluation of Routine Atmospheric Sounding Measurements using Unmanned Systems (ERASMUS) project. The weekend was spent preparing aircraft and sensor systems for flight. All...

With a final automated flight in the fog and a series of low level box patterns over the beach on Saturday, we concluded the summer ERASMUS deployment to Oliktok Point, Alaska. With over 150 aircraft launches, 50+ profiling flights, including 23 individual profiles in a single 12 hour block, 23...

Multiplexered up that is! Thanks to the heroic efforts of our Boulder colleagues (being at DIA at 6:45am to drop off a package is heroic) and the amazing machine that is commercial air travel, the multiplexers arrived in Deadhorse on Saturday. Due to soggy roads and oil rig movements (the...

Starting yesterday, August 6th, we began data collection flights. Because the autopilot is still on the blink, they are manually flown up to around 500m (1640ft). Unfortunately, this means that the shape of the profiles is very dependent on the wind and that the ascent and descent rates are not...

While we managed to avoid damaging any aircraft today and brought a 6th plane back to flight status, that's about all for this 3rd day at Oliktok. The first flight showed that the changes made last night solved the pitot/static isssue, but did not keep the autopilot from hanging. By...

We've gotten into the air! Thankfully, the weather cooperated today and we ended up with some gorgeous flying weather. Blue skies, calm winds, and no mosquitoes make flight operations a breeze, and were very much appreciated after the past two days of rain, wind and fog. We managed to get...

After arriving at the Oliktok Point Long Range Radar Station (LRRS) around midday yesterday, we spent the afternoon at the atmospheric observation facility (called the AMF) preparing the small fleet of DataHawk aircraft for flight, and the evening getting oriented at the LRRS. In the morning, after a quick breakfast,...

Now that the EA-DDDAS framework has been put through the paces, we're planning two days of flight testing that allow the system operate fully autonomously. This means that the high-level planner and trajectory optimization layer will be left to their own devices to communicate, generate energy-aware trajectories, and send seamlessly...

We've flown a full system test with data flow originating from the dual-doppler radar synthesis, feeding the energy-aware path planner resulting in plans sent accordingly to the PixHawk autopilot on-board the Tempest aircraft. Several different radar and atmospheric planner configurations were tested today to see how the aircraft performance varied...