To fight the diffusion of COVID-19, INAF-OAPA proposes an innovative prototype of a static aerial platform for observations from a certain quote. The technology, developed in the field of surveillance for public safety, environmental monitoring, such as illegal landfills, traffic, smog, fires and for precision agriculture, can be fruitfully migrated to other fields such as open areas monitoring, to identify large gatherings of people outdoors

Collura, A.

Gulli, D.

LO CICERO, UGO

Montinaro, N.

Puccio, E.

TODARO, Michela

OA@INAF - Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica

2022Publication Year2023-07-17T13:31:25ZAcceptance in OA@INAFA kite balloon system for the monitoring of gatherings in open areasTitleTODARO, Michela; Gulli, D.; LO CICERO, UGO; Montinaro, N.; Puccio, E.; et al.Authorshttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12386/34290HandleMEMORIE DELLA SOCIETA ASTRONOMICA ITALIANAJournal93NumberMem. S.A.It. Vol. 93, 98© SAIt 2022 Memorie dellaA kite balloon system for the monitoring ofgatherings in open areasM. Todaro1,2, D. Gulli1, U. Lo Cicero2,1, N. Montinaro2, E. Puccio1, and A. Collura21 Università degli Studi di Palermo – Dipartimento di Fisica e Chimica ”E. Segrè”,Via Archirafi 36, 90123 Palermo, Italy2 Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica – Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo ”G.S. Vaiana”,Piazza del Parlamento 1, 90134 Palermo, Italy e-mail: michela.todaro@inaf.it11 October 2021; Accepted: 17 January 2022Abstract. To fight the diffusion of COVID-19, INAF-OAPA proposes an innovative pro-totype of a static aerial platform for observations from a certain quote. The technology,developed in the field of surveillance for public safety, environmental monitoring, such asillegal landfills, traffic, smog, fires and for precision agriculture, can be fruitfully migrated toother fields such as open areas monitoring, to identify large gatherings of people outdoors.1. IntroductionIn the last decades, new technological systemswere introduced in the field of aerial moni-toring. These devices allow rapid and large-scale detection of images and different param-eters of interest (temperature, humidity, pres-sure) which can be useful to address issuesboth in urban and rural environments (Walshet al. 2018). Sensors able to reveal specificenvironmental parameters can be installed on-board drones (UAV) or air-crafts, to acquirelarge scale images of a territory (Colomina etal. 2014; Korolkov et al. 2018). Many ofthese devices have found an additional appli-cation in contrasting the diffusion of the 2020pandemic. Indeed, the COVID-19 emergencyimposed strict though necessary limitations onpersonal freedom during the Italian lockdown.The state lockdown required putting in placesafety measures, which limit both public andprivate activities, imposing social distancing.In several instances, helicopters and droneswere deployed to monitor cities and promptlyintervene whenever rules were ignored. Aerialsurveillance has proven a valid aid in monitor-ing outdoor activities and affluence of peopletowards gathering areas such as parks, hospitalparking lots, malls, etc.INAF-OAPA offered its expertise on visi-ble (VIS) and Infrared (IR) remote monitor-ing by tethered balloons in cooperating withthe fight against the COVID-19 pandemic dif-fusion. A prototype of an aerial monitoringplatform was developed as an alternative tohelicopters and drones for the surveillanceof open-air areas at risk of large gatherings(Chandrasekharan et al. 2016). The platformis made of a highly stable helium filled bal-loon tethered to ground, equipped with a pay-load suited for monitoring the presence of peo-ple/vehicles remotely and processing the ac-quired images, to be placed at a fixed altitudeby a winch. The selected balloon uses mixedfeatures, based on floating and aerodynamics,to keep a stable stationary altitude for con-Todaro: A kite balloon system for the monitoring of gatherings in open areas 99Fig. 1. Skyhook tethered Helikite.tinuous and synoptic monitoring of vast ar-eas of territory. This system allows continu-ous monitoring for long periods (months), witha greater level of spatial detail, which can bemanaged independently by the user accordingto their needs and with greater variety of dataacquired. Other advantages are the improvedtime to costs ratio and no acoustic emissions.Furthermore, from the bureaucratic side, no li-censes are required, just a clearance by thecompetent authority (NOTAM ENAC/ENAVATM-05A). Moreover, it is easy to handle be-cause it does not need an expert pilot.Up until now, this kind of aerial platformwas used for advertising or scientific purposes(Ramponi et al. 2018; Peterzen et al. 2005;Masi et al. 2007) in Italy, and in Europe formonitoring and surveillance in the military, oiland maritime sectors or for aerial photography(Verhoeven et al. 2009).2. Tethered balloonThe balloon is a Helikite made by an Englishcompany, ALLSOPP HELIKITES Ltd. inFordingbridge (Uk). The model of the kiteis named Skyhook, whose resumed techni-cal specifications are reported in Table 1(www.allsopp.co.uk).The Skyhook is made of a helium filledpolyurethane bubble, with a sheet thickness ofabout 0.9 mm, supported by a rhomboid kitewith major diagonal length of about 3.7 m anda minor diagonal of 2.9 m. A picture of theSkyhook is reported in Fig. 1.The presence of these two parts, the bub-ble and the kite, allows the balloon to exploitboth wind and helium for its total lift. In par-ticular, the selected model has great stability inthe presence of strong winds as well as withoutwind (worst flight conditions in terms of liftingpower). The skyhook shows high load capacity(12 kg at 24 km/h of wind speed and 4 kg with-out wind), and is tethered to ground through awinch, allowing it to be placed at a fixed alti-tude up to 500 m. Furthermore, it exhibits anexcellent volume/lift ratio whereas the mixedaerostatic and aerodynamic technology com-pensate for the effects of expansion / contrac-tion of gas inside the balloon. The Skyhook isequipped with several tools such as a payloadanchoring system, a 12 V winch with dyneemacable (an high strength very light and UV re-sistant material) with a winding speed of 20m/min, an inflatable ground station to land andlift-off the balloon, and a safety barometric sys-tem to induce forced landing. The safety sys-tem is capable of quickly deflating the balloonif the rope were to break or the balloon were toget detached, ensuring its vertical fall within apredetermined safety area.2.1. On board instrumentationThe payload of the aerial platform is designedto fit the lift specifications of the balloon inthe worst-case scenario of no wind (weight-ing less than 4 kg). The instrumentation is acustom system consisting of two cameras, forVIS and IR acquisitions, accommodated in avibration damping and pointing system (gim-bal), plus electronics for telemetry and remotecontrol (see Fig. 2).The daylight picture and video acquisitionsare performed in remote with a Sony FCB fullHD high-resolution camera, with lens able tooperate from wide (f=4.3 mm and F1.6) totele (f=129 mm and F4.7) with a 30x zoom.The CMOS sensor resolution is 1920×1080,with a diagonal length of 1/2.8 inches andpixel side of about 4 µm. The IR acquisitionsare entrusted by a Flir Vue Pro 640r thermal100 Todaro: A kite balloon system for the monitoring of gatherings in open areasTable 1. Technical specification of the Skyhook aerostatHelikite Type Helium Lift in no Lift in 25 Km/h Max wind speed Max unloadedcapacity (m3) wind (approx.) wind (approx.) (approx.) altitude (approx.)Kg Kg Km/h mSkyhook 11 4 12 60 1700Fig. 2. Gimbal that hosts a HD VIS camera and anIR camera for night vision.imaging camera, which adopts an uncooled mi-crobolometer sensor with dimension of 10.88mm x 8.704 mm, pixel size of 17 µm and a res-olution of 640×512, able to get with its fixedoptic, accurate measurements with calibratedtemperature for each pixel in a spectral bandranging between 7.5 - 13.5 µm. Both cam-eras are mounted on an active gimbal that al-lows them to point towards the area of interestwhile continuously stabilizing them. To sendthe stream of the data, the platform is equippedwith a 5.8 GHz digital wi-fi transmitter for thereal-time monitoring through a ground station(tablet/smartphone/laptop). The gimbal is cur-rently remotely controlled manually, via a joy-stick radio control. Furthermore, the system isequipped with a GPS for accurately pinpoint-ing a target and to allow for the creation of mo-saic maps.2.2. Trial aerostat launchThe use of this platform, to the extent of thepresent work, is in the field of aerial surveil-lance to monitor outdoors activities in areas atrisk of assembly, to control the flux of peo-ple/vehicles to critical areas and to promptlywarn the competent authorities whenever vi-olations of the anti-assembly rules occur. Forthis purpose, the trial launch of the plat-form prototype took place in a suitably identi-fied strategic location, which provided enoughspace for a safe launch and for recovery oper-ations (e.g. sufficiently cleared grounds). Thetest allowed validating the potential of themonitoring platform from a quote of about 200m over the sea, to evaluate the mechanical sta-bility of the vector, the optical image and therobustness of the telemetry streaming. To testthe HD camera, two images, either withoutzoom or with 30x zoom were acquired, as re-ported in Fig. 3.The preliminary tests performed duringdaytime hours with the HD camera provedthe platform ability to resolve distant objectswith an excellent level of detail and stability.According to the estimates, the vision of theHD camera can cover an area of about 1 km2around the launch point from an altitude of 200m, whereas the IR camera could prove use-ful at detecting heat sources during night-time,Todaro: A kite balloon system for the monitoring of gatherings in open areas 101Fig. 3. Images acquired with no (left) and 30x zoom (right).though with reduced performances due to botha lack of optical zoom and a lower resolutionof the detector.To make the monitoring system complete, apreliminary feasibility study on a software forautomated people/vehicles identification fromaerial images started in collaboration with theItalian company Injenia. The idea is to pro-vide a proof-of-technology of the available so-lutions according to use-case needs to identifypeople within a representative subset of aerialimages at fixed altitude to evaluate the soft-ware accuracy and efficacy. The proposed solu-tions would adopt models based on deep learn-ing aimed at object detection and structured onregion-proposal architecture and convolutionalkernel pre-trained on a reference data-set.3. ConclusionsTo fight the diffusion of COVID-19, INAF-OAPA proposed the use of an aerial platformsystem, originally designed for environmentalchecking, to monitor the flux and gathering ofboth people and vehicles. The system is stilla prototype, but offers a promising viewpointto this purpose. Presently, it is conceived tooperate “manned”, since it requires the pres-ence of somebody who can monitor the imagesin real time, alerting the competent authoritieswhenever necessary. Several improvements areforeseen to be potentially implemented suchas remote control, which would allow the onboard instrumentation to be handled from afar,and the integration of machine learning algo-rithms to automatically detect and report po-tentially dangerous situations, based on num-ber and relative distances between identifiedpeople. Such algorithms can be developed in ageneral framework, separately from the hard-ware, that is, the tethered balloon, making it aprime tool that can be migrated from Covid-19surveillance to other fields that require moni-toring and remote object identificationReferencesChandrasekharan, S., et al. 2016, IEEECommunications Magazine, 54, 26Colomina, I., et al. 2014, ISPRS J.Photogramm. Remote Sens., 92, 79Korolkov, V. A., et al. 2018, IOP Conf. Ser.:Earth Environ. Sci., 211, 012069Masi, S., et al. 2005, Proc. 18th ESASymposium on European Rocket andBalloon Programmes and Related Research,507Peterzen, S. E., et al. 2005, Proc. 17th ESASymp. on European Rocket and BalloonProgrammes and Related Research, 403Ramponi, M., et al. 2005, Proc. 17th ESASymp. on European Rocket and BalloonProgrammes and Related Research, 413Verhoeven, G. J. J., et al. 2009, Archaeol.Prospect., 16, 125Walsh, O. S., et al. 2018, Advances in RemoteSensing, 7, 71

A kite balloon system for the monitoring of gatherings in open areas

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A kite balloon system for the monitoring of gatherings in open areas

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