Small Uncrewed Aircraft and Autonomous Platforms Data Working Group

Small uncrewed aircraft (sUAS, also known as drones, remotely piloted aircraft or uncrewed aerial vehicles) and Autonomous platforms have become important tools for collecting data from the environment. They offer the potential to acquire data at higher temporal and spatial resolutions and in environments that are too hazardous to work in. Today, with the development of miniaturised sensors and the availability of performant autopilot hardware and software, they have become accessible and cost-effective platforms for collecting high volumes of data.

While cloud computing infrastructures can offer the necessary scalability for processing the large volumes of data produced by these platforms, the lack of common data and metadata practices is a barrier to interoperability and reuse.

Following the example of marine autonomous platforms, which is much further advanced in terms of data and metadata standardisation, the aim of the Small Uncrewed Aircraft and Autonomous Platforms Data WG is to produce recommendations for data and metadata coming from sUAS and autonomous platforms to support interoperability and reuse of these data in research data infrastructures. The WG will collect use cases of data collection and processing by uncrewed and autonomous platforms from different disciplines and document best practices. The WG will use the collected material to develop recommendations for data and metadata best practices, focusing on interoperability with virtual research environments (VREs) such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), the African Open Science platform.