Standardised Science Embedded Data ecosystem for Drones

THE SCIENCE OPPORTUNITY Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)s for science now presents the scientific community with a remarkable opportunity. While not a panacea for all challenging environments, UASs offer many advantages to a range of scenarios. From simple cost savings, safety gains, and a lowered impact on the environment being monitored, through to providing access to inaccessible areas, and better resolution sampling (<2.5cm resolution imagery, vertical profiling). However, perhaps one of the most significant advantages is that of increasing the ease with which measurements can be taken over much wider area, without radically increasing the cost. This ease of sampling also leads to improved data currency and increased repeat measurements THE REMAINING BARRIER However, while these advances are opening this door of opportunity, science-specific sensors, and the software required to operate and appropriately manage the data for such on UASs, remains a nascent, closed, and expensive domain. With many scientist reinventing the proverbial wheel at great cost, or being simply unable to take advantage of UAS due to a lack of engineering support. SSEDD SOLUTION ++ SSEDD is our proposed solution to the above, a fully open software stack designed for science (in it standards and sensor support), to be usable without extensive engineering support, and to be UAS platform independent. Looking further ahead, SSEDD will also provide the backend infrastructure necessary to not only log sample data, but process and triage it on board the drone as it arrives. This will enable both greater sampling automation (for instance auto navigation to revisit a sensor reading hot spot for a finer granularity sampling survey), and ensure only relevant data need be transmitted down the remote link and stored on board consuming space.