High Altitude Reusable Weather Balloon Based Autonomous UAV
Recent growth in 3D printing, personal UAV design, and microcontrollers, has led to these technologies becoming more affordable and consumer available. As a result the use of these technologies has led to a great deal of innovation in areas that were formerly restricted to government organizations and large corporations. 3D printing allows for the design and fabrication of complex custom parts quickly and cheaply. UAVs are becoming more and more intelligent, able to fly predetermined paths without any need for human feedback. They are capable of correcting for variations in weather conditions and other anomalies to reach a human defined destination. As a result there has been a recent push to develop smart UAVs for search and rescue applications as well as land and crop surveys. Both of these technologies have been made possible by smaller and more affordable microcontrollers.
The goal of this experiment is to incorporate these three technologies into a weather balloon to create a high altitude multipurpose platform suitable for use in various applications. Current weather balloons drift for several hundred kilometers and are barely salvageable after landing impact. It is important to combine a weather balloon’s high altitude capabilities with artificial intelligence and a propulsion system to create a UAV capable of flying at such altitudes. This UAV design could be used for near space photography, astrophotography, and weather monitoring. High altitude UAVs could also be used for search and rescue or land survey, similar to their low altitude counterparts. Using a high altitude platform however would allow for sampling of much larger areas in a shorter period of time. Applications for high altitude UAVs could be extended into global communication systems. Due to the high altitudes achieved by weather balloons, line of sight could be achieved over large coverage areas. A network of solar powered high altitude UAVs could be used to create a network servicing remote areas without the need to launch expensive satellites.