Development of a small-sized mobile aerostat system

Abstract With the advantages of wide coverage, long endurance, rapid response, and high cost-effectiveness, tethered aerostats have become an attractive elevated platform to carry payloads to conduct surveillance and communication tasks in natural disaster rescue, crowd management, key assets protection, and border surveillance. The paper presents the development of a fast-response ellipsoidal aerostat system (FREAS) for surveillance and communication applications. Requirements for technical parameters, design and engineering, and field tests of the FREAS are described. The field tests show that video surveillance and relay communication performances fully meet expectations for the development. Future work to further verify and improve the aerostat system is finally addressed.