AtlantikSolar Flies Disaster Support Mission over the Amazon in Brazil

Just beyond the Brazilian city of Belém's lush green gorges, mango tree-lined streets, and idyllic beaches lies a ship that sunk just over a month ago. With 5,000 cattle on board and more than 700 tons of diesel fuel, the ship has left authorities in the Amazon port of Barcarena with an environmental dilemma. In the tropical heat, the remains of the cattle have begun to decompose posing a challenge to the Brazilian government agencies and salvage teams weighing health and safety issues against the ecological impact of clean-up efforts. To inform their decision making processes, the Brazilian authorities needed further data and aerial imagery to assess the situation.

At the same time in Zurich, Philipp Oettershagen, Thomas Stastny, and Timo Hinzmann doctoral researchers from ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab, along with Rainer Lotz, technical support and pilot, readied shipping crates containing two AtlantikSolar aircraft – unmanned solar airplanes with wingspans of 5.6 meters and weighing in at 6.9 kilograms for shipment to Brazil. After achieving a record breaking 81-hour flight for its class earlier this year, the AtlantikSolar team was looking forward to testing the resilience of the autonomous aircraft in different climatic conditions, gathering atmospheric data, and testing digital imaging and mapping technologies to complement studies on the function and dynamics of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. The test flights were part of two-week long project called, externe Seite Aventura AtlantikSolar with externe Seite swissnex Brazil and externe Seite Presence Switzerland to strengthen partnerships in science, technological, and innovation between Brazil and Switzerland.

“Real-World Mission”

Swiss Ambassador André Regli welcomed the ETH team to Brazil referring to AtlantikSolar as a "...lighthouse project, the first Swiss research of its kind in the State of Para." State Secretary of Para, Alex Fiusa de Mello and project partner, externe Seite Censipam - a government agency in Brazil charged with environmental protection of the Amazon, emphasized the importance of collaboration between science and technology to protect the last remaining rainforest areas for the future of mankind. It quickly became clear to the team that a “real-world” survey mission of the port area in Barcarena would not only be the most effective test of AtlantikSolar’s technology, but quite simply the right thing to do.  After all, AtlantikSolar was designed for this type of mission as part of the European Union’s externe Seite ICARUS research initiative to create robotic tools that can assist “human” crisis intervention teams.

On Wednesday, 21 October, after a long pre-dawn drive through the forest, over bridges, and narrow escapes with on-coming trucks, the team arrived at Caripi beach in Barcarena. At this geographical point, the Rio Para River, a tributary of the Amazon River, stretches forth into a bay so wide that the opposite shore lies invisible beyond the horizon. Two Brazilian television reporters filmed the launch and interviewed the AtlantikSolar team before they boarded the boats provided by the coast guard and Para State Police. The aircraft flew approximately 10 kilometers to reach the disaster site. Despite winds of up to 10 meters per second and strong waves up to 2 meters high, AtlantikSolar successfully mapped the disaster area with its optical and infrared cameras detecting possible oil spills and dead cattle in the vicinity of the sunken ship. Unfortunately, on the way back to the launch area, strong winds and problematic operational conditions stressed the aircraft to its structural limits, resulting in an uncontrolled water landing and damage to the first prototype.

“If at first you don’t succeed…”

It is common knowledge that Thomas Edison needed more than 10,000 attempts to create the light bulb. So, the AtlantikSolar team pressed on with a thorough investigation of the situation they resolved the root cause for the unsuccessful first flight and launched the second airplane in the calm morning light on Saturday, 24 October just as the first rays of sunlight illuminated it's highly efficient externe Seite CSEM photovoltaic solar panels. The one-hour test flight went smoothly and recorded images of the bay and beach areas used to assess residual oil slicks from the disaster.

“…Try, try again”

Motivated by the technical success of the second flight and the repeated demand for aerial imagery by the Brazilian authorities, the AtlantikSolar team decided to use the second airplane to give the disaster support mission another try. A local fisherman ferried the team out to a tourist boat that resembled a school bus and they followed the plane up river to the disaster zone. Over the port area in Barcarena, it captured further images of the sunken ship and gathered 70 gigabytes of data on atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, and solar radiation. After the aerial mapping mission, the airplane – followed by a boat and a crew struggling with heavy waves - successfully flew back to the launch site navigating heavier winds than it had endured on the first day; however, only seconds before the scheduled landing a communication failure caused the aircraft to slightly miss its landing spot on the beach and instead made a water landing that precluded further test flights.

Even with the setbacks the data and the high resolution optical camera on-board AtlantikSolar were used to create a 3-dimensional map that later helped Censipam determine the extent of environmental damage as well as predict where the current in the river might deposit any additional oil slicks or bovine remains during salvage operations. While, the AtlantikSolar mission in Brazil was fraught with climatic, geographic, and technical challenges, Philipp Oettershagen, AtlantikSolar's project lead said, “Operating in these conditions and accepting the risks associated with them is vital – and in fact the only way – to test and improve the design of unmanned aircrafts such as AtlantikSolar towards more robustness and to thereby tailor them even more specifically towards future real-world disaster support missions.”