Background & Description
Throughout Earth’s history, volcanic eruptions and their products have consistently posed significant hazards, annihilating any nearby signs of life with lava flows, pyroclastic flows, volcanic glass and toxic gases to name a few. Today, many communities still live nearby volcanoes due to the fertile soil around the area, hence making volcano surveillance crucial for risk reduction. Volcano surveillance can be done through efforts like monitoring gas emissions, thermal imaging and remote sensing techniques. In recent years, the use of remote sensing techniques has become increasingly popular. Coupled with the surge in drone technology, this has led to the rise in prominence of glider drones used for remote sensing.
Using drones for volcano monitoring offers many advantages. Dr Emma Liu, a volcanologist from the University of Cambridge, shares this opinion: “Drones offer an invaluable solution to the challenges of in-situ sampling and routine monitoring of volcanic emissions, particularly those where the near-vent region is prohibitively hazardous or inaccessible. These sensors not only help to understand emissions from volcanoes, they could also be used in the future to help alert local communities of impending eruptions — particularly if the flights can be automated.”
However, one of the prevailing challenges of drone surveillance is that drones expend a substantial amount of energy gaining altitude, which can become especially pronounced when these drones ascend to higher altitudes (> 3 km for volcano surveillance). This limits the amount of energy and hence flight time available for the actual aerial survey, hence compromising the efficiency of the surveillance operation.
To address the problem of inefficient ascent, a promising approach would be to adopt the usage of a weather balloon. The end product would be a balloon-glider drone hybrid in which the helium-filled balloon serves the function of bringing the fixed-wing glider to a certain altitude before the release mechanism is activated to separate the glider from the balloon. The autopilot system of the glider will also ideally be activated, allowing it to carry out surveillance using its data-recording instruments as it glides around the volcano till descent. While the seniors have successfully shown the workability of the helium balloon ascent and hot-wire cutdown mechanism, the autopilot system unfortunately failed to activate and was partly attributed to the imprecise release of the hot-wire cutdown mechanism. Hence, this project will focus on developing a new cutdown mechanism that allows for immediate release upon command, with the end-goal being the achievement of autonomous flight. We will attempt a proof of concept for autonomous helium-assisted flight.
Our vision
The fundamental aspiration of this balloon drone project is to carry out autonomous volcano surveillance operations in an energy-efficient approach. This year, our team aims to achieve autonomous flight & improve on the functionality of volcano UAV surveillance operations on top of what our seniors have achieved. In addition, we aim to bring innovation to the release mechanism of the aircraft in order to enhance the precision of the surveillance operation, thereby improving the chance for autonomous flight.