Miniaturization of high spectral spatial resolution hyperspectral imagers on unmanned aerial systems

Traditional airborne environmental monitoring has frequently deployed hyperspectral imaging as a leading tool for characterizing and analyzing a scene’s critical spectrum-based signatures for applications in agriculture genomics and crop health, vegetation and mineral monitoring, and hazardous material detection. As the acceptance of hyperspectral evaluation grows in the airborne community, there has been a dramatic trend in moving the technology from use on midsize aircraft to Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). The use of UAS accomplishes a number of goals including the reduction in cost to run multiple seasonal evaluations over smaller but highly valuable land-areas, the ability to use frequent data collections to make rapid decisions on land management, and the improvement of spatial resolution by flying at lower altitudes (<500 ft.). Despite this trend, there are several key parameters affecting the use of traditional hyperspectral instruments in UAS with payloads less than 10 lbs. where size, weight and power (SWAP) are critical to how high and how far a given UAS can fly. Additionally, on many of the light-weight UAS, users are frequently trying to capture data from one or more instruments to augment the hyperspectral data collection, thus reducing the amount of SWAP available to the hyperspectral instrumentation. The following manuscript will provide an analysis on a newly-developed miniaturized hyperspectral imaging platform, the Nano-Hyperspec®, which provides full hyperspectral resolution and traditional hyperspectral capabilities without sacrificing performance to accommodate the decreasing SWAP of smaller and smaller UAS platforms. The analysis will examine the Nano-Hyperspec flown in several UAS airborne environments and the correlation of the systems data with LiDAR and other GIS datasets.