IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2012 - 94

before the storm left the operations area defined by the
COA (gray lines in Figure 7), ending the sampling mission.

research environment," Weather Forecast., vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1510-
1521, 2010.
[7] P.-H. Lin and C.-S. Lee, "The eyewall-penetration reconnaissance

Conclusions
Future UASs will be fielded to provide targeted observations of severe local storms and related phenomena by
combining science-driven autonomous control with online
modeling and data assimilation. Regulatory, logistical, and
technical challenges exist that will need to be overcome to
put these systems into practice. The Tempest UAS demonstrated proof of concept for the in situ sampling of severe
local storms. Experiences with the Tempest highlighted
regulatory, logistical, and technical challenges in the context of supercell thunderstorm penetration and informed
the development of future airborne autonomous sampling
and targeted observation systems.

observation of typhoon longwang (2005) with unmanned aerial vehicle,

Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the work of the Research and
Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV)
at the University of Colorado, particularly Tom Aune,
Anthony Carfang, Cory Dixon, Jason Durrie, Jason Roadman, and Maciej Stachura. They also thank Jeff Snyder for
providing some of the radar data used to generate results.
This research is supported by National Science Foundation
(NSF) grants AGS-0824160 and IIS-0845835.

[11] K. Weekly, L. Anderson, A. Tinka, and A. Bayen, "Autonomous river

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"Coordinated control of an underwater glider fleet in an adaptive ocean
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[20] P. M. Markowski, "Hook echoes and rear-flank downdrafts: A
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2012
