AggieAir — a low-cost autonomous multispectral remote sensing platform: New developments and applications

Data acquired by aircraft, satellites and other sources of remote sensing has become very important for many applications. Even though current platforms for remote sensing have proved to be robust, they can also be expensive, have low spatial and temporal resolution, with a long turnover time. At Utah State University (USU), there is an ongoing project to develop a new small, low-cost, high resolution, multispectral remote sensing platform which is completely autonomous, easy to use and has a fast turnover time. Many new developments have been added to AggieAir which have improved the flight performance and flexibility, increased the flight time and payload capacity. Furthermore, these developments have made it possible to carry an imaging system with more quality and resolution. With these new developments, AggieAir has begun work with many projects from areas in agriculture, riparian habitat mapping, highway and road surveying and fish tracking. Development on AggieAir continues with future plans with a thermal inferred camera, an in house iner-tial measurement unit (IMU) and better navigation to handle higher winds.