Unmanned Science - Embracing the Inevitable

Small Vehicle, Small Sensors       The initial criteria for a sense and avoid sensor are going to be physical.   A small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) weighing less than 55 pounds is not going to have the available cargo allowance to add much weight in sensors and maintain usefulness for its mission.   The sensor must provide enough range and accuracy to the UAV to be worth installing but also must be light enough and efficient enough to not cause the UAV to drain its power source at an unacceptable rate.   The next criteria deal with the goals of the sensor.   Being installed on a small UAS, it can be determined the UAV will not be operational in an airspace which has manned aircraft equipped with cooperative sensors such as ADS-B or TCAS-II.   According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), UAVs which operate at these higher altitudes are going to require systems which use cooperative and non-cooperative sensors for sense and avoid procedures (NASA, 20

Making History, Kind Of In July 2016, the Dallas Police used a robot to kill a gunman which had already killed two police officers and injured others (Sidner & Simon, 2016) .   The gunman was in a position which did not allow for police officers to get a direct shot in order to neutralize him via traditional means.   The police chief gave instructions for an unconventional plan to be developed and the use of a bomb disposal robot was conceived.   The robot delivered a pound of explosives within a deadly radius of the shooter and detonated, killing the gunman.   The robot was an early version of the Remotec F5, which is part of the now Northrop Grumman Andros line of robots (Orf, 2016) .   This line of robots now includes the FX, Titus, HD series, and the F5’s newest version, the F6B (Northrop Grumman, 2017) .   These vehicles are used mostly in bomb disposal, vehicle inspection, and other military and police missions.   Using robot to kill a human being is not something new

            This report will discuss the data protocol and format for the DJI Inspire 2 unmanned aerial system (UAS).   This small multirotor is setting the standard for professional grade filming from a stable UAS platform.   The system is equipped with multiple sensors which are used specifically for flying the vehicle and avoiding obstacles (DJI, 2017) .   These sensors include a downward vision system, upward infrared (IR) sensor, and a forward vision system.   Each of these are used to alert the operator or flight management computer of an impending obstacle allowing the system to put in the needed control inputs (DJI, 2017) .   The data from these sensors has no need to be stored as it is used by the vehicle immediately upon reception.   Recalling the data is not something the designers thought the Inspire 2 needed.     Figure 1. Inspire 2 Obstacle Avoidance Sensors (DJI, 2017)             There is a sensor on-board the Inspire 2 which produces the data the