Unmanned Science - Embracing the Inevitable

     Selecting an appropriate unmanned aerial system (UAS) should always come down to the mission.   Photography and video is already a technically involved field without placing the camera equipment onto a gimbal and attaching that to a UAS.   My selection for a UAS needed to perform photography and video is the Yuneec Tornado H920 Plus.   This is a hexacopter capable of 24 minutes of flight time up to 400 feet above ground level (AGL) (Yuneec, 2017) .   My selection for this vehicle is twofold.   First of all, to take a good picture or video the platform must be stable and allow the sensor to be employed without any impedance.   The H920 uses five separate rotors to give the stability while supporting a full 360 degree gimbal below the main chassis which has a CG04 camera attached capable of 3x optical zoom, 16 megapixel photos, and 4K resolution video (Yuneec, 2017) .   To better increase the effectiveness of the sensor, it ...

Unmanned Systems Maritime Search and Rescue             Maritime disasters requiring search and rescue (SAR) operations are always running against a clock.   Those in need of rescuing are usually in need of medical attention, are in danger of succumbing to the elements, or may even be running out of air to breath.   These reasons plus many more are why additional assistance for search and rescue are always welcomed by those tasked with the SAR mission.   There are currently many different systems being developed all over the world to perform different parts of the SAR mission.   For this work the Thunderfish, designed and manufactured by Kraken Robotics, will be discussed.       Unmanned Looking for Unmanned      Kraken and its Thunderfish were recently contracted to search Lake Ontario for nine Avro Arrow flight testing models which were lost over Lake Ontario in the 1950s duri...