Detect and Avoid of Weather Phenomena on-board UAV: Increasing Detection Capabilities by Information Fusion

The expected increase of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil airspace is driving research activities in the field of UAV Sense and Avoid. In terms of the application of unmanned air cargo transport, new multifunctional on-board systems can be envisaged, which allow to avoid both, other air traffic as well as hazardous weather areas. In order to prevent icing and turbulence, such a weather function should be able to detect dangerous weather phenomena. In addition, the weather function could offer the possibility to operate UAVs in compliance with visual flight rules (VFR) by observing legal minimum cloud distances. In this paper we propose a combination of AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) based weather radar and electro optical-cloud detection onboard UAV in order to increase the weather detection capabilities of both sensor systems. Besides the individual systems, the combination of both sensor systems and their advantages are described in detail. Furthermore, application scenarios are defined and shown using sample images from test flight campaigns.