Faculty Candidate Seminar
Development and coordination of practical balloon swarms for
persistent in situ real-time measurement of hurricane development
Wednesday, March 29, 2017 | 4:00 p.m. | RICH 910
ABSTRACT
This talk proposes a low-cost balloon observation system for sustained (week-long), broadly distributed,
in-situ observation of hurricane development. The high-quality, high-density (in both space and time)
measurements to be made available by such a system will be invaluable in significantly improving our ability
to estimate and forecast such extreme and dangerous atmospheric events. Scientific challenges in this overarching problem, which is of acute societal relevance, include:
(a) the design and engineering (see [A]) of small (3 kg, 5.5 m^3 at 8 km altitude), inexpensive (<$2k), robust,
sensor-laden, buoyancy-controlled balloons that don’t accumulate ice, and are deployable from the launch
chutes (13 cm diameter x 91 cm long) of existing NOAA aircraft,
(b) the ultra-low-power operation of the environmental sensors, GPS, logic, and both balloon-to-satellite and
balloon-to-balloon radios leveraging cellphone-grade and IoT technologies,
(c) the implementation of a self-reconfiguring Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) amongst the (mobile) balloons
to maintain low-power balloon-to-balloon VHF or UHF communications, typically over 10 to 30km distances,
and
(d) the development of hierarchical systems-level control algorithms for autonomously coordinating the
motion of the balloons in the swarm to simultaneously achieve, on average, both good coverage and good
connectivity while minimizing the control energy expended, including the tight integration of
- a (centralized) model-predictive control (MPC) strategy for large-scale coordination (see [B]), leveraging
simultaneous (albeit, grossly under-resolved) estimation/forecasting efforts at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and their cutting-edge WRF hurricane data assimilation/forecasting code, and
- a new (decentralized) three-level-control (TLC) strategy for smaller-scale disturbance rejection (see [C]),
designed to correct only occasionally, as necessary, for the random walk of the balloons due to the (significant)
excitations by the (strong) unresolved turbulent flowfield fluctuations.
Relevant references:
[A] Meneghello, Bewley, de Jong, Briggs (2017) A coordinated balloon observation system for sustained insitu measurements of hurricanes. IEEE Aerospace Conference.
[B] Bewley, & Meneghello (2016) Efficient coordination of swarms of sensor-laden balloons for persistent, in
situ, real-time measurement of hurricane development, Phys. Rev. Fluids 1, 060507.
[C] Meneghello, Luchini, & Bewley (2016) On the control of buoyancy-driven devices in stratified, uncertain
flowfields, International Symposium on Stratified Flows (ISSF).
Thomas R.
Bewley, Ph.D.
UCSD Flow Control and
Coordinated Robotics Labs
UC San Diego
Thomas R Bewley (BS/MS, Caltech, 1989; diploma, von Karman Institute for Fluid
Dynamics, 1990; PhD, Stanford, 1998) directs the UCSD Flow Control and Coordinated
Robotics Labs, which collaborate closely on interdisciplinary projects. The Flow Control
Lab investigates a range of questions ranging from theoretical to applied, including the
development of advanced analysis tools and numerical methods to better understand,
optimize, estimate, forecast, and control fluid systems. The Coordinated Robotics
Lab investigates the mobility and coordination of small multi-modal robotic vehicles,
leveraging dynamic models and feedback control, with prototypes built using cellphonegrade and IoT technologies, custom PCBs, and 3D printing; the team has also worked
with a number of commercial partners to design and bring successful consumer and
educational-focused robotics products to market.
TEXAS A&M ENGINEERING | engineering.tamu.edu/aerospace