Year: 2017

Free UAS Awareness and Best UAS Practices for Emergency Management Class at Governor’s Hurricane Conference

Roboticists Without Borders offered two sessions of a 3.5 hour class consisting of three modules: unmanned systems awareness, unmanned aerial systems awareness, and best UAS practices at the 2017 Governor’s Hurricane Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida. Over 35 emergency professionals representing over 28 local and state agencies attended and received certificates for participation. The class targeted chiefs and managers who are interested in what UAS (and robots in general) have been used for, what are the costs including the hidden costs of manpower, training and maintenance, what are the regulatory issues, and how to handle public perception. The class also went through the types of missions involved in each major type of disaster and the associated unique CONOPS and workflows for each mission. The class emphasizes data management and how to get, and share, actionable data in real-time.

The modules were created by Florida State University Emergency Management and Homeland Security Program and the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. The material is based on formal training created by CRASAR originally funded by the State of Florida, plus lessons learned from over 30 deployments by RWB members, and studies by FSU and Texas A&M. The modules are normally incorporated in a longer class with hands-on demonstrations of unmanned systems.

The class is offered for free as part of the RWB mission to accelerate the adoption of unmanned systems by emergency professionals.

Columbia mudslide: recommendations for UAVs for search and for public works

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Columbians in the wake of the terrible flooding and mudslide.

CRASAR’s experiences with such situations suggest that it is a very difficult search and rescue (and victim recovery) problem. We’re assisted with the Oso Mudslides in partnership with the Fit Innovation Team (some of the video is the highlight reel) and also with the 2015 Texas Memorial Day floods with Lone Star UAS Center which swept over 40 people over a 5 mile area of remote river wilderness. Please note that while our UAV flights at the Memorial Day floods were victim search and recovery missions, the Oso Mudslides was for Public Works. When a disaster happens, while search and rescue teams are working, the engineering experts are also working to mitigate and prevent further catastrophes and to start on economic recovery. Both are important missions!

Here’s some videos that we prepared for the White House and Congress on the use of UAVs, artificial intelligence, and informatics technologies.

From our best practices guides, here are some recommendations for UAV operators:

Standard procedure is to take high resolution imagery and then have a group of trained experts examine each image.  Crowd sourcing can have two problems if not done correctly. One is that most people make major mistakes interpreting aerial images, particularly when the images may be from different altitudes or looking straight down. Hence “trained experts.” Formal methods exist for rating the accuracy of  people looking at the image (called coders). The other is unintentional violations of privacy– putting out images that may contain victims and saying “hey, everyone, come look at this”.

Since the images are geotagged, it doesn’t matter which images they look at.

Video generally isn’t helpful because of lower resolution and fuzziness when you try to pause.

Victims may be covered in mud and buried in debris so clumps large enough to contain a body may be put on the list for investigation by a ground team

 

 

 

SXSW!

I will be participating in the SXSW panel on Beyond BB-8: When Robots Start Acting Human! Another opportunity to talk about disaster robotics and show how robots and AI are assisting the emergency and disaster communities.

It’s been a busy few months at CRASAR. More companies and universities have joined Roboticists Without Borders and we participated in a four county wilderness search and rescue exercise last month with small unmanned aerial systems and a small unmanned marine vehicle with sonar for recovering a submerged body.  The sUAS work yielded valuable data on the use of thermal imaging for finding survivors (short version: not great if the victim is under a tree), and general workflow and concepts of operations.

Three of our Roboticists Without Borders members- Justin Adams, David Kovar, and David Merrick- also chaired sessions at the first National Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Drone Conference and Summit.

I’ve given several talks, including the Assessing the Technological Turn on Humanitarian Action workshop for the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore program in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) and I’ll be at the UN in June.

But nearest and dearest to my heart is that we continue to forge forward on the use of unmanned surface vehicles, small UAVs, computer vision,  and LTE wireless solutions to assist with preventing the marine mass casualty drownings of the refugees. The two EMILYs donated in our deployment last year are still in use by the Hellenic Coast Guard (who used it to rescue over 20 refugees stranded on the rocks in high seas) and Hellenic Red Cross and we look forward to taking more autonomous versions back this summer. We got great feedback from the Italian Coast Guard. But it’s a been a year and we’d like to directly help…

See you at SXSW!