Embedded Reasoning for Atmospheric Science Using Unmanned Aircraft Systems

This paper addresses the use of unmanned aircraft systems to provide embedded reasoning for atmospheric science. In particular, a specific form of heterogeneous unmanned aircraft system (UAS) is introduced. This UAS is comprised of two classes of aircraft with significantly different, though complementary, attributes: miniature daughterships that provide improved flexibility and spatio-temporal diversity of sensed data and larger motherships that carry and deploy the daughterships while facilitating coordination through increased mobility, computation, and communication. Current efforts designing unmanned aircraft for in situ sensing are described as well as future architectures for embedded reasoning by autonomous systems within complex atmospheric phenomena.