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Klemas, V.V., 2015. Coastal and environmental remote sensing from unmanned aerial vehicles: An overview. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a viable alternative to conventional platforms for acquiring high-resolution remote-sensing data at lower cost and increased operational flexibility. UAVs include various configurations of unmanned aircraft, multirotor helicopters (e.g., quadcopters), and balloons/blimps of different sizes and shapes. Quadcopters and balloons fill a gap between satellites and aircraft when a stationary monitoring platform is needed for relatively long-term observation of an area. UAVs have advanced designs to carry small payloads and integrated flight control systems, giving them semiautonomous or fully autonomous flight capabilities. Miniaturized sensors are being developed/adapted for UAV payloads, including hyperspectral imagers, LIDAR, synthetic aperture radar, and thermal infrared sensors. UAVs are now used for a wide range of environmental applications, such as coastal wetland mapping, LIDAR bathymetry, flood and wildfire surveillance, tracking oil spills, urban studies, and Arctic ice investigations.

Even as human–robot interactions become increasingly common, conventional small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS), typically multicopters, can still be unsafe for deployment in an indoor environment in close proximity to humans without significant safety precautions. This is due to their fast-spinning propellers, and lack of a fail-safe mechanism in the event of a loss of power. A blimp, a non-rigid airship filled with lighter-than-air gases is inherently safer as it ’floats’ in the air and is generally incapable of high-speed motion. The Spherical Indoor Coandă Effect Drone (SpICED), is a novel, safe spherical blimp design propelled by closed impellers utilizing the Coandă effect. Unlike a multicopter or conventional propeller blimp, the closed impellers reduce safety risks to the surrounding people and objects, allowing for SpICED to be operated in close proximity with humans and opening up the possibility of novel human–drone interactions. The design implements multiple closed-impeller rotors as propulsion units to accelerate airflow along the the surface of the spherical blimp and produce thrust by utilising the Coandă effect. A cube configuration with eight uni-directional propulsion units is presented, together with the closed-loop Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) controllers, and custom control mixing algorithm for position and attitude control in all three axes. A physical prototype of the propulsion unit and blimp sUAS was constructed to experimentally validate the dynamic behavior and controls in a motion-captured environment, with the experimental results compared to the side-tetra configuration with four bi-directional propulsion units as presented in our previously published conference paper. An up to 40% reduction in trajectory control error was observed in the new cube configuration, which is also capable of motion control in all six Degrees of Freedom (DoF) with additional pitch and roll control when compared to the side-tetra configuration.

This paper introduces a compact LIDAR system designed to inspect overhead transmission line for maintenance purposes. This LIDAR system is carried by a small unmanned helium airship, which is guided by GPS and laser ranging to fly automatically along the power-line over a limited distance. The 3D coordinates of the power line, power tower and power line channel features are gathered by LIDAR. Test have been accomplished using this blimp-based compact LIDAR power-line inspection system. Its inspections of a 500kV power lines also shows the high efficient inspection, less risk to personnel and more inspections per day compared with manual inspection.

Lighter-than-air, unmanned, tethered platforms for small-format aerial photography include balloons and blimps. Hot-air and helium blimps have been developed and tested successfully in the field. Both provide stable platforms for lifting camera equipment in calm or low-wind conditions. The operating range for blimps overlaps that of kites, so a combination of a blimp and kites spans wind conditions from calm to 40 km/h. A helium blimp is smaller, substantially lower in cost, and easier to operate compared to a hot-air blimp with equivalent lifting capability. However, helium is not readily available in many regions, and in such places a hot-air blimp would be the only practical lighter-than-air platform for small-format aerial photography under low-wind conditions.

The success of monitoring programs often is determined by the ability to detect short-term changes in ecological systems that are occurring at fine scales of resolution. Here we describe a blimp system to acquire low-altitude aerial photography and videography useful for evaluating fine-scale patterns in rangeland communities. The tethered blimp served as a portable and economical platform capable of lofting still and video camera equipment to an altitude of 122 m above the earth's surface. The system was an effective tool to monitor rangeland vegetation, providing a compromise between ground-based methods of data collection and fixed-wing or satellite remote sensing.

The AeroPod, developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility, is a passive device that uses aerodynamic forces to stabilize an instrument package suspended from a kite or tethered blimp. The AeroPod's design for steadying and damping payloads includes the use of a tail boom and fin combination. It is a novel design and provides a relatively simple alternative to the traditional methods for suspending equipment from kites or blimps. NASA's AeroPod is better than the traditional Picavet pulley-style suspension system for kite-flight because it's lightweight, simple to construct, and has no moving parts.