Unmanned Vehicles for Autonomous Sensing and Sampling 2017 Scientific Campaign

The goal of the UVASS (Unmanned Vehicles for Autonomous Sensing and Sampling) project is the use of unmanned vehicles to perform air, water and ice data sensing and sampling in dangerous places (e.g. close to fronts of tidewater glaciers), difficult to access for human beings. The purpose of the Arctic expedition carried out in Summer 2017 by ISSIA-CNR, in cooperation with other institutions, was the use of a little swarm of unmanned vehicles performing simultaneous data acquisition in order to improve the understanding of phenomena related to the global climate changes, especially ice melting. The marine autonomous vehicle PROTEUS was equipped with sensors and samplers, i.e. multi-parametric probe and turbidimeter and towed a small trimaran vessel hosting heavy or voluminous sensors i.e. an automatic water multisampler, a plankton multisampler and a SeaBird CTD probe. Besides PROTEUS, two drones were also used: the OTTO drone recorded pictures and videos of the area and was equipped with additional payload (thermal camera, humidity, temperature and air quality sensors) to collect environmental parameters. The Splash drone was used to record videos and images of the coordinated operations performed by PROTEUS and OTTO for documentary and dissemination purposes. The atmospheric data coming from OTTO, together with the marine data acquired by PROTEUS, will allow scientists to obtain a good characterisation of the whole marine-air column in the proximity of tidewater glaciers.