Very-long endurance solar powered autonomous UAVS: role and constraints for GMES applications

The wide range of applications for civilian UAVs, will open up a variety of markets for potential sales and economic growth. The Scientific Community could benefit in many ways from employing UAVs in the civilian sphere. Within the EC funded project TANGO “Telecommunications Advanced Networks for GMES Operations”, a three-year European Commission (EC) programme with the aim to develop, integrate, demonstrate and promote new telecom services dedicated to GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment & Security) requirements, a multicriteria comparison between different UAV configurations has been implemented and different configurations have been assessed regarding a lot of representative scenarios (Risk & Crisis, Maritime, Security, Land cover, Humanitarian Aid). Almost all these scenarios can be performed with success by UAVs. Nevertheless, the civil market for the use of UAVs will remain difficult to develop until operational regulations for the use of UAVs in non segregated airspace are developed and approved by ATM authorities. Two different configurations were developed in details:1) A Solar powered HALE configuration was designed and a 1:3 scaled prototype (24m wing span) was manufactured and tested up to failure load to show reliability of technological process & theoretical analysis 2)The flying model SESA (Small Electric Solar Unmanned Airplane) was manufactured within the EC funded projects CAPECON and TANGO, to carry out several experimental flight test with a small UAV and to demonstrate some critical technologies and applications. The UAV was positively introduced in a TANGO demonstration where a flight test was prepared for final integration in cooperation with Iridium satellite system.