SBIR-STTR Award

The Weather Scout project will help to fill a significant gap in the current UAS ecosystem: sub-regional weather understanding aloft in urban, suburban, and rural environments. Flying Weather Scouts of mission-appropriate sizes/strengths mounted with mission-appropriate sensors (e.g., LIDAR, anemometer, EO/IR, etc.) will capture critical environmental data (e.g., winds, icing, visibility, etc.) to 1) provide real-time observations for UAS mission decision making, and 2) feed those observations into existing/emerging sub-regional weather models and machine learning (ML) to improve the accuracy of those models. The Weather Testbed we develop to support Weather Scout will also be useful for vetting other Agility Prime platforms with respect to weather.

This STTR project combines multiple non-defense commercial solutions to solve a significant defense and commercial gap in the current remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) / unmanned aerial system (UAS) ecosystem: sub-regional weather understanding aloft in urban, suburban, and rural environments. With the Weather Scout project, Daniel H. Wagner Associates, Inc. (DHWA) and the University of North Dakota (UND) are leveraging a significant amount of prior research and development to provide the Department of the Air Force (DAF), other Department of Defense (DoD), other government (e.g., NASA, FAA), and commercial customers with a critical evaluation of multiple novel weather sensors onboard a UAS for detecting icing, turbulence, and visibility at standoff distance to support safer and more efficient RPA/UAS operations. In this Phase II project, we will focus on the testing/evaluation of these three specific sensors onboard a UAS capable of carrying them in flight. In a subsequent Phase II or Phase III, we would incorporate real-time telemetry and integrate the system with a mission planning / ground control system.