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5/6/2006:
Design Expo Center Poster 12/15/2005: Final report is available in the Documents section. Abstract: There is a need in the meteorological community for the ability to measure state variables such as temperature, pressure, and humidity in the atmosphere, especially in extreme conditions such as those that exist in a severe storm or in the polar regions. The Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) at the University of Colorado is actively seeking to address this need through the study and use of unmanned vehicles. The RECUV group is pursuing cooperative mobile sensing systems with three particular areas of focus: wildfire, polar, and storm. The severe conditions that exist in these three environments create a need for mobile, robust, and autonomous sensing systems. The current availability of meteorological sondes is primarily limited. Most current sondes are available only as dropsondes, which limits their functional descent and directionality. Conversely, there also exists a fully autonomous and maneuverable UAV with similar data gathering capabilities, the Aerosonde. Even though these vehicles are small (on the order of 30-lb maximum takeoff weight), they are too expensive to be considered expendible. A specific need thus exists to create low cost sondes with a controlled descent capability and the ability to operate successfully in severe conditions such as those that exist in storm and polar environments. This senior project group will investigate the dispersal and communications issues of a distributed sensor system of low-cost, maneuverable sondes with the design and test of a system that demonstrates the feasibility of a system that might be deployed in severe environments.
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