Laser-based aircraft tracking system could aid disaster relief

The Hyperion system, which uses eye-safe lasers with a wavelength of 1,550nm, is being developed by researchers at Oxford University and Airbus Group with funding from EPSRC and Innovate UK.

With the rise in the use of UAVs for surveillance and disaster monitoring, and the increasing amount of data being produced by on-board sensors on modern aircraft, there is a growing need for a more lightweight method of transmitting this information back to the ground, according to Prof Dominic O’Brien, who led the Oxford team.

Existing point-to-point radio frequency communication systems for aircraft tend to be quite heavy, limiting the length of time for which smaller UAVs can fly, he said.

The Hyperion system consists of a ground unit that aims a laser beam up to the aircraft, where it is captured by a lightweight retroreflector.

A shutter on top of this retroreflector is turned on and off to modulate the beam, encoding it with the data to be transmitted. The device then reflects the beam back to the ground unit for decoding.