Data Gathering
Autonomous vehicles are best at automating some tedious or dangerous task. A very common task is data gathering, whether it be aerial photographs, live video, environmental data or something else. Any of the vehicles shown here can be used to gather data by incorporating the appropriate sensor.
Once the data is gathered, it can either be transmitted in real time or stored on board for retreival after the mission. Transmission equipment can be expensive but gives the data instantly for possible retasking during the mission, while storing the data on board allows for long range completely automatic data gathering. Since all the vehicles in the lab carry GPS, recording the location of the data gathered is trivial and maps can be created showing the data gathered.
