How to Fly at Floods: Summer Institute PLUS Roboticists Without Borders UAV training

Posted by admin on Jul 21, 2015 at 10:25 am America/Chicago

One word about the floods and about UAVs: informatics. Read on to see what I mean ;-) As I blogged earlier, on July 16-28, the Center for Emergency Informatics' 2015 Summer Institute is on flooding and will bring together state agencies and municipalities who were part of the Texas floods with researchers and industry for a two-day workshop and 1 day exercise. The exercise will include UAVs flying the missing persons missions and the recovery and restoration missions. Notice that it's the Center for Emergency Informatics hosting the event because it's about the right data getting to the right agencies or stakeholders at the right time and displayed in the right way that will enable them to make the right decisions. UAVs (and marine vehicles such as Emily and the small airboats being developed at Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, and University of Illinois) have a big role to play. But UAVs are useful only if the entire data-to-decision process works, aka informatics. The Summer Institute July 26-28 will also host a training session for Roboticists Without Borders members specifically on UAVs and the best practices of how to fly at floods and upcoming hurricanes and collect the useful data-- what do the decision makers need? Again, this is the informatics, the science of data, not the aeronautics. The training is independent of platform- because what the decision makers need is what they need ;-)  The current (and evolving) best practices are derived from three sources:

1. CRASAR RWB deployments going back to 2005 Hurricane Katrina Pearl River cresting and including the Oso Mudslides and our deployment with Lone Star UAS Center to the Texas floods,
2. the reports and analyses of what has worked at typhoons and other flooding events worldwide, and
3. what researchers through out the world, especially the IEEE Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics technical community, are doing.

For example, video is not as useful as high resolution imagery for searching for missing persons. Infrared isn't helpful except in the early morning. Some missions and terrains require remote presence style of control, other can use preprogrammed flight paths. Complex terrains such as river bluffs may require flight paths that are vertical slices, not horizontal slices. Many more and I'm sure we will learn more from each other. The training session will consist of evening classes on July 26 and 27, with field work on July 28 at the 1,900 acre Riverside Campus. We will fly fixed-wing and rotorcraft for response missions (reconn, missing persons, flood mitigation) and for recovery/restoration (damage assessment, debris estimation, household debris estimation, power utility assessment, transportation assessment). The scenarios will be designed by experts from Texas Task Force 1 and the representatives from the agencies that would use the information, including the fire rescue, law enforcement,  Texas insurance commission, SETRAC, etc.). It's not too late to join Roboticists Without Borders and attend! It's free. Hope to see you there!