A FULLY AUTOMATED SYSTEM FOR REMOTE SENSING APPLICATION ON ULTRA LIGHT AIRCRAFT

Topic: Aircraft Navigation, Avionics, Communications) Remote sensing is a key technology for several activities such agriculture, land use or soil and air pollution monitoring. Nowadays commercial high spatial resolution imagery both from airborne and spaceborne sensors is still very expensive and delays between the acquisition and delivery time of the information, often make these applications not useful for practical use. (1) In order to reduce the costs of these applications, extending the number of possible customers, the use of Ultra Light Aircrafts (ULA) equipped with fully automated system for multi/hyperspectral image acquisition (based on COTS components) shall represent a possible solution. (2) The combination of the economy of an ULA (management costs, maintenance, fuel consumption, etc) and the use of COTS components (latest technologies, low power consumption and the capability to control a large number of instruments) guarantees high performances, reduced delivery time and compatibility with previous remote sensing data. F.A.S.T.E.R stands for Fully Automated SysTem for Environmental monitoRing; the project is currently carried out through a collaboration between the Flight Mechanics laboratory and the Microsatellite laboratory of the II Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna and the consortium Envi-net. Aim of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of very high resolution image acquisition from a standard equipped ULA, providing extended capabilities for onboard data processing (orthorectification, mosaic) and storage. Pilot interface is made of two different parts: an analytical model including the complete aircraft dynamics and a prediction system, and a graphical part made of a guidance tube, a rescue tube and the predictors indicators. The graphical part is implemented in the Dynaworlds environment and is projected on a high brightness, sunlight readable touch screen LCD. A functional diagram of F.A.S.T.E.R is presented in Figure 1 showing all system components and their integration.