Development of an autonomous unmanned aerial system to collect time‐stamped samples from the atmosphere and localize potential pathogen sources

Abstract

This paper presents the hardware development and testing of a new concept for air sampling via the integration of a prototype spore trap onboard an unmanned aerial system (UAS). We propose the integration of a prototype spore trap onboard a UAS to allow multiple capture of spores of pathogens in single remote locations at high or low altitude, otherwise not possible with stationary sampling devices. We also demonstrate the capability of this system for the capture of multiple time-stamped samples during a single mission. Wind tunnel testing was followed by simulation, and flight testing was conducted to measure and quantify the spread during simulated airborne air sampling operations. During autonomous operations, the onboard autopilot commands the servo to rotate the sampling device to a new indexed location once the UAS vehicle reaches the predefined waypoint or set of waypoints (which represents the region of interest). Time-stamped UAS data are continuously logged during the flight to assist with analysis of the particles collected. Testing and validation of the autopilot and spore trap integration, functionality, and performance is described. These tools may enhance the ability to detect new incursions of spores. C 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Low-altitude, high-resolution aerial imaging systems for row and field crop phenotyping: A review

“…Some of those include: weed detection (Herwitz et al, 2004;Göktogan et al, 2010;Torres-Sánchez et al, 2013;Rasmussen et al, 2013), aerobiological sampling (Techy et al, 2008;Schmale et al, 2008;Gonzalez et al, 2011;Aylor et al, 2011), leaf area index estimation (Hunt et al, 2008), soil characterization (Sugiura et al, 2007;d'Oleire-Oltmanns et al, 2012), water status (Sullivan et al, 2007;Berni et al, 2009;Suárez et al, 2010;Zarco-Tejada et al, 2012;Gago et al, 2015), diseases Sankaran et al, 2013;Calderón et al, 2013Calderón et al, , 2014, pest management (Huang et al, 2009) and yield estimation (Irmak et al, 2000;Swain et al, 2010) among others. Some of these applications are discussed in Zhang and Kovacs (2012).…”

“…The UAV-based disease management has three major applications: (i) assessing the pest/disease development and symptoms (Yue et al, 2012;Garcia-Ruiz et al, 2013;Sankaran et al, 2013), (ii) assessing and monitoring the pathogen in atmosphere (Gonzalez et al, 2011;Aylor et al, 2011), and (iii) precision spraying (Cao et al, 2013;Faiç al et al, 2014). Evaluating the susceptibility of different plant varieties to diseases caused by soil-borne fungal pathogens, nematodes, viruses, air-borne or vector-based fungal or bacterial infections is a promising application.…”

Detection of a surrogate biological agent with a portable surface plasmon resonance sensor onboard an unmanned aircraft system

“…Schmale has also used a spore trap integrated into a small UAS platform for aerobiological sampling. Gonzalez et al (2011) designed and used a time-marked spore trap to gather a time history of spores captured with a UAS. For real-time biological detection, Anderson et al (1999) used a fiber-optic immunoassay biosensor integrated into a small UAS platform to detect plumes of Bacillus globigii released on the ground (Ligler et al 1998).…”

Collaborative mapping of an earthquake‐damaged building via ground and aerial robots

“…However, there are several examples of prior works employing methodologies similar to our own approach for either ground or aerial platforms (Bachrach et al, 2011; Pellenz et al, 2010), including cooperative mapping with ground and aerial platforms (How et al, 2009; Kim et al, 2010). Researchers have also pursued the mapping of complex environments for applications such as search and rescue via ground and aerial platforms (Gonzalez et al, 2011; Murphy et al, 2009; Pratt et al, 2008). Therefore, the contributions of this work are twofold.…”