Drones for science

Recently in terraXcube’s Large Cube, a very special test took place: two large drones loaded with various heavy equipment were flown inside the largest test area of the Extreme Climate Simulation Center’s chambers.

While the pilot's skill in maneuvering the drones in an enclosed space was certainly noteworthy, what made the experiment interesting was something else: the chamber had been artificially raised to an altitude of nearly 9,000 m.a.s.l. ̶ well in excess of the altitude of our planet’s highest peaks. It was the first time that the free flight of a drone had been tested inside the terraXcube at these simulated altitudes.

The higher the altitude, the thinner the air. And, thin air results in a decrease of the drone’s thrust capacity. Owing to this, it’s necessary to test the effectiveness of the engines ̶ especially when loaded with equipment which on this occasion, reached up to 4 kilograms.

Land monitoring and natural disaster prevention, however, are just two of the areas where the use of remotely piloted aircraft has been tested over the past decade. “It all depends on the instrumentation that is used,” explains Abraham Mejia Aguilar, "for example, by combining particular cameras and spectroscopic analysis, drones become valuable tools to understand whether a forest or an apple orchard is healthy.” Using the images captured by drones, spectroscopy can help assess whether a plant is healthy or diseased. The data gathered can then be confirmed through random ground-based measurements.

“Compared to satellite images, those captured by drones display much higher accuracy and detail, even at the level of an individual plant.” In recent years, drones have proved highly useful in acquiring data to study the presence of fungi and bacteria in crops in South Tyrol, assess the impact of the processionary moths in forests, and monitor the spread of apple broom, one of the most dangerous diseases that affect apple cultivation. In the future, drones could be used to assess the spread of the bark beetles that attack spruce trees and that are also increasingly present in areas affected by Storm Vaia – all before damage is visible to the naked eye. There’s more.

In the deep dolomite gorge of Bletterbach, researchers were also engaged in checking another key aspect: the transmission of data from the drone to the ground rescue team, which was transmitted to the pilot via LoRaWAN protocol, technology that uses little energy and which is able to transmit over great distances.

“It is precisely in the transmission of data that we expect to see the most noticeable improvements in the coming years, thanks to research and technological advances,” explains Roberto Monsorno. “In the context of mountain rescue, drones need not only to operate with as little energy as possible, they also need to be able to transmit a large amount of important data in real-time-or near real-time.”