Monitoring Atmospheric Phenomena within Low-Altitude Clouds! with a Fleet of Fixed-Wing UAVs

International audienceThis poster depicts on-going work on the development of a fleet control approach to probe low-altitude cumulus clouds. From an atmospheric science point of view, there remain numerous uncertainties and even unknowns in the cloud micro-physics models that could be alleviated with the acquisition of a variety of data within and around the cloud. Wind currents, pressure, temperature, humidity, liquid water content, radiance, aerosols are data of interest that must be collected with a spatial and temporal resolution of respectively about 10m and 1Hz over the cloud lifespan. Deploying a fleet of UAVs for this purpose raises a series of challenges: exploring the cloud is a poorly informed and highly constrained adaptive sampling problem, in which the UAVs motions must be defined so as to maximize the amount of gathered information and the mission duration