First Russian Scientific Experiments on Studying the Natural Environment Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Information received from remote sensing satellites has been successfully used in various economic sectors of the Russian Federation for many years. However, there are cases when it is impossible to promptly obtain satellite observation data on the state of the natural and man-made environment in various regions of the country (the presence of cloud cover on the Earth, the failure of spacecraft orbits to pass through a given region at a given time of survey, different spatial resolution of the equipment, etc.). In this case, customers of space surveys need to obtain subsatellite information products in the form that specific users deal with (for example, the state and volume of biomass in forest, agricultural, ecological ecosystems, etc., at the time of survey). Therefore, for subsatellite operational observations, it is necessary to develop a local monitoring system based on small aircraft: unmanned aerial vehicles with a minimum set of various onboard equipment (black-and-white and color panoramic cameras; IR radiometers, radars, lasers, etc.) depending on the task at hand.