Design-Drivers of Hybrid Mission Scenarios: Effects on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Design and Mission Management

Kurzfassung

Motivated by rapid progress in sensor development, companies, organizations, and government authorities show growing interest in versatile unmanned aerial vehicles for increasingly complex and integrated tasks in civil conditions. In order to evaluate and compare research in context of missions with hybrid flight speed requirements, we introduce two benchmark scenarios based on civil search and rescue operations in mountainous areas. The scenarios contain different challenges like the identification of multiple persons in a narrow area in winter (buried avalanche victims) and the identification of a single person in a wide area in summer (missing paraglider). Both incidents take place in the European Alps with current standard infrastructure provided. In addition, we illustrate detailed settings of the scenarios and sources for terrain (shuttle radar topography mission data, SRTM3) and all required airspace and weather data. The missions are introduced as benchmark for research groups dealing with single components, overall configurations, or any other aspect of unmanned aerial vehicles. We exemplarily show how to use the scenarios for unmanned aerial vehicle design and mission management applications.