Unicamp researchers are part of the thematic project that brings together seven working groups
Noamay – “to care for and protect”, in the Yanomami language – is the name given to an airship that should enter into operation, on an experimental basis, in the socioeconomic and environmental context of the Amazon – the forecast is for 2020. The InSAC thematic project (Fapesp- CNPq), started in 2014 and running until 2021, involves seven working groups, one from Unicamp (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, FEM) and other different institutions and companies. The project follows a new concept of “lighter than air” unmanned aircraft, capable of flying autonomously and collecting data from the air, soil and vegetation, as well as radio signals emitted by collars on animals. Noamay, previously called Droni (Robotic Airship of Innovative Design), was renamed this way when it performed its first guided flight, in 2018.
Ely Carneiro de Paiva, professor at FEM and main researcher of the Unicamp working group, explains that the Noamay airship is an innovative project due to the four electric motors equipped with steerable propellers, so that they can rotate 360 degrees, in the so-called rotation system. multidimensional vectorization. “The airship is very efficient for monitoring because it is silent when using electric motors, as in our case. It is expected to carry out preliminary tests near Tefé, 500 kilometers by boat from Manaus. Next to this municipality are two environmental reserves – Amanã and Mamirauá”.
The Mamirauá Sustainable Development Institute (IDSM) is located in the Mamirauá reserve, a partner in the project and where the first tests of all scientific projects related to the Amazon are invariably carried out. “As an example, one of these projects, by our partners at UFAM [Federal University of Amazonas] with research centers in Spain and Australia, called Providence, is placing a network of cameras and microphones hidden in the forest, and the data is transmitted in real time to researchers via satellite.”
The project for the construction and operation of the Noamay airship is an initiative of the Renato Archer Information Technology Center – CTI. According to Paiva, the Unicamp group is responsible for the airship's automatic control and guidance software, with CTI-Renato Archer and ITA (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica) being responsible for the onboard electronic and communication system. “In the simulator, we have already obtained results from complete flight control, with the airship rising and falling vertically and traveling through the observation points. The next step will be to actually board the system on the airship. We are in the transition phase of the project to UFAM and correcting a small problem with excess weight so that the airship can fly with maximum autonomy.”
The Noamay project has already yielded two doctoral theses at Unicamp, the last of which was defended on August 8 by Henrique de Souza Vieira, a student of Ely Paiva who worked with the controls for tracking the airship's trajectory. “For a complete autonomous flight, which includes taking off, hovering over a chosen point and landing, there are major challenges when it comes to control. Automatic controls can be classified as linear or nonlinear. This thesis addresses trajectory tracking, positioning control and navigation of a robotic airship with steerable electric thrusters, using non-linear control techniques”, explains the author of the research.
Ely Paiva highlights that the thematic project is led by USP in São Carlos, under the coordination of professor Marco Henrique Terra, and is mainly focused on mobile robotics. “We have underwater robots, with people from Coppe [Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Engineering Research, at UFRJ]; land robots, with USP and Unicamp; and also drones (multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles), with UFMG and USP-São Carlos, as well as other partners. This airship project, in fact, is the continuation of the Droni project, coordinated by researcher Samuel Bueno, who recently retired.”
This airship with an innovative design was designed and built by the company Omega AeroSystems, from Paraná, which was also part of the Droni project and is correcting the problem of excess weight for tests with the system on board in the Marirauá reserve. The airship measures 11 meters in length, with a diameter of 2,5 meters in the central part, weighing 38 kilos without helium gas (only with flight equipment) and capacity for an additional 6 kilos of payload – empty and folded, it fits inside a large suitcase.
The FEM professor adds that Noamay is a pilot project and, therefore, has the autonomy to stay in the air for an hour, and the idea is to build a second airship, larger in size and that could hover all day over a point of departure. observation, consuming energy just to move. “Coordination will now be the responsibility of professor Reginaldo Carvalho, from UFAM, who has mini-planes, drones, a balloon for telecommunications and many ideas, one of which is to use drones to take medicines to communities along the river, accessible only by boats; Another idea is to evolve the Providence project, which I mentioned previously, with Australia and Spain, to reach up to 1.000 sensors in the forest, initially at the base of the trees and then in the canopy, aiming to monitor animals and eventually detect invasions.”
Ideal for monitoring
In the researcher's opinion, the airship is the ideal vehicle for monitoring in the Amazon, not only because it is silent, but also because the region has the lowest average wind speed in the country. “If the wind is strong, it can cause instability in the airship, especially at low altitude. Luciana Gatti, an important researcher at Inpe [National Institute for Space Research] and mother of a former student of mine, uses planes to measure CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere of the Amazon, and had her research on the cover of the magazine Nature in 2014, where it showed that in 2010 the forest emitted more CO2 than it absorbed, that is, it became a generator of carbon dioxide that year.”
Recently, Samuel Bueno and Luciana Gatti discussed the possibility of the Inpe researcher using low-altitude sensors, when the idea of transforming Noamay into a multipurpose platform is realized, as an alternative to manned flights, which are very expensive. “Environmental and agricultural monitoring are closely related. With the airship it is possible to monitor, through images, the color of the soil (level of nutrients) or vegetation (indicative of pests), at 100 or 500 meters of altitude, offering another type of information compared to the satellite, for example, that operates at high altitudes.”
The Unicamp professor highlights that there is also a lot of research underway with the so-called UAV (an acronym in English for unmanned aerial vehicle), both in agriculture and in monitoring power transmission lines and gas pipelines. “Drones have been used, but they do not have sufficient autonomy for long lines. Professor Reginaldo Carvalho, from UFAM, had the idea of using the airship as a mothership to supply drones, in 2010, but it was the company Amazon that launched the patent. I think the future is this: drones, when the application requires speed, and the airship, when silence and greater autonomy are needed; or the combination of both. The United States army has already developed an airship capable of remaining in the air for twelve days, for monitoring in Afghanistan.”
Two decades of research and the first autonomous flight The Noamay project researchers have been working with airships for over 20 years and professor Ely Paiva has participated in the projects since the beginning, when a partnership between CTI (then Renato Archer Research Center, CenPRA) and IST (Instituto Superior Técnico) in Lisbon resulted in the first autonomous flight of an airship in the world, on March 4, 2000. At that time, the entire technological component of the project was coordinated by researcher Josué Ramos, from CTI, who had also developed a preliminary flight simulator. “Before coming to Unicamp in 2010, I had worked as a researcher at CTI since 1998, when we started a cooperation project with professor José Azinheira, from IST, to evolve the simulator of the old airship, which had only two combustion engines and an oversized GPS, which weighed half a kilo – was not good for monitoring”, recalls Ely Paiva. “Noamay, in addition to four engines, is much more agile when maneuvering in the air, and brings other techniques that we had not tested and that we have now validated in the simulator.” Henrique Vieira, supervised by Paiva, came to Unicamp to defend his doctoral thesis, but has already been following the sequence of the Noamay project at UFAM, together with professor José Reginaldo Hughes Carvalho, now with a scholarship from Fapean (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Amazon). In the thesis, the author provides a history of this multi-institutional collaboration that continues within the scope of the InSAC Thematic Project - National Institute of Science and Technology for Autonomous Cooperative Systems (InSAC). Vieira says that Noamay is an evolution of the Aurora project (an acronym in English for Unmanned Autonomous Robotic Airship for Remote Monitoring), also created by the CTI in 1997, focused on the creation of technologies for the autonomous operation of an aircraft for environmental monitoring and missions. air control. Among several partnerships for the execution of the Aurora project, the initial one was with IST-Lisbon, with the landmark being the first autonomous flight of an airship in scientific literature, in the year 2000 – the second would be carried out just a few years later, in Stuttgart, in Germany. Recent cooperation took place with the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Institute (IDSM), a social organization promoted and supervised by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), which develops its activities in the areas of the Mamirauá and Amanã Reserves (which total 3,5, XNUMX million hectares), in the Médio Solimões region (AM). Other equally important partnerships would emerge during the project, with ITA, UFAM and Unicamp, as well as universities in France and the United Kingdom. According to Henrique Vieira, the pioneering Aurora project led to a new aircraft design, using a different propulsion configuration, with four vectorizable electric thrusters (replacing the classic pair of combustion engines) to increase the airship's maneuverability, especially at low speeds. This evolution was named Noamay, becoming part of InSAC in 2017. Within this thematic project, the airship specifically fits into the working group of lighter-than-air aerial platforms for detection, communication and information systems for the Amazon. |