Category: Breaking News

Hurricane Harvey Deployment for Fort Bend County OEM: 119 flights over 11 days

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm5tcJzS3Go&feature=em-subs_digest[/youtube]

Group photo, missing USAA and Hydronalix teams.
Group photo with TAMU, FSU, Kovar & Associates, LSUASC, PrecisionHawk and Intel, missing USAA and Hydronalix teams.

The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) coordinated the largest known deployment of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by public officials for a federally declared disaster- both serving as Air Operations for manned and unmanned aircraft and deploying small UAS ranging in size from DJI Mavics to the Insitu ScanEagle. The deployment was for the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management with whom CRASAR had provided assets for previous floods. CRASAR flew 119 mission flights from August 25 (preparing for landfall) to September 4 (when the emergency life-saving response and restoration of services phases of the disaster were largely over), with a record 61 flights on one day. The deployment was led by Justin Adams, who served as Air Operations branch director for Fort Bend County manned unmanned ops and CRASAR Roboticists Without Borders coordinator. Videos are available on Fort Bend County OEM’s website in accordance with the county’s drone data policy; there may be a backlog of posting due to the size of the event.

The UAS flights were for

  • rapid spot checks of situation awareness of people in distress
  • the extent of flood and tornado damage
  • how many people had not evacuated, access routes to neighborhoods
  • projecting how long the neighborhoods would be cut off, throughout the county (which is very large and hard to get a handle on)- based on information coming to EOC, the county’s projections and knowledge from 2016 floods- not just easiest or most compelling for media to fly or waiting for complete coverage by manned assets
  • inform the public and dispel rumors- allowed County Judge Hebert  to immediately and directly address Citizens’ concerns and dispel rumors, e.g., postings to social media about a particular neighborhood, then tasked to fly that neighborhood to get eyes on to inform the EOC as to the situation and to show the community; water is coming over the Richmond railroad bridge
  • systematically document damage for federal disaster relief and future planning
  • project river flooding by monitoring the river and confirming river flood inundation models
  • monitor the river and condition of over 100 miles of levees through out the county

There were additional flights for videography, training, and some flights were actually multiple flights where UAS had to return home for a battery change before continuing. Each mission flight was to satisfy a request made by officials throughout the county following their incident command system. CRASAR also directed Air Operations for the county, coordinating all manned and unmanned assets.

The center was requested by Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management on Aug 24 and activated the Roboticists Without Borders program, which consists of companies, universities, and individual experts who have been trained in disaster response; volunteer their time, travel, and equipment; and conform to Fort Bend County OEM data management policies. The RWB brought in 24 unmanned aerial vehicles and 2 unmanned marine vehicles in from five institutional members: Florida State University Center for Disaster Risk Policy (5), GroundVu (2), Hydronalix (3),  Kovar & Associated (1), Lone Star UAS FAA Center of Excellence (3),  PrecisionHawk (1), and USAA (2) plus Intel (1). RWB provided 13 UAS pilots, 3 UMV operators, and 4 data managers. The team members were from 6 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Texas, and Washington State. In addition PrecisionHawk donated five Lancaster UAS and access to their DataMapper software, Boeing Insitu deployed their Scan Eagle through Lone Star UASC,  and Intel loaned a Falcon 8 UAS designed from structural inspection, for a total of 25 UAS platforms. The platforms were, in alphabetical order, AirRobot 200, AirRobot 180, DJI Inspire, DJI Mavic, DJI M600 Pro, DJI Phantom 3 Pro, DJI Phantom 4 Pro, Insitu Scan Eagle, Intel Falcon 8, Parrot Disco, PrecisionHawk M100, PrecisionHawk Lancaster 5, 3DR Solo, and UAUSA Tempest.

In addition, there were other significant UAS donations by other groups. Rocky Mountain Unmanned Systems loaned a Z30 camera high resolution and high zoom payload that increased the area of view. AirMap adapted their popular UAS flight app for use by CRASAR, allowing the members to see which of their UAS were in the air at the same time as well as other UAS who reported that they were flying in the area. PrecisionHawk’s LATAS tags for the Lancasters were very helpful as well. LSUASC loaned access to Harris’ RangeVue software, allowing AirOperations to see manned flights and alert UAS teams of approaching low flying aircraft.  Other donations and support came from ESRI, FireWhat, GroundView, RemoteGeo, Salamander Technologies, Sweetwater Video, and TAC Aero.

Two EMILY unmanned marine vehicles, small robot boats, were available. One was outfitted with a side scan sonar and used to attempt to determine flow rates of the river. The other was outfitted for swift water but was not needed during the rescue phase of operations.

Hurricane Harvey: some video of flights in Fort Bend County

UAVs We’ve certainly been busy flying for Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management plus our member Justin Adams serving as AirBoss for manned and unmanned aircraft- see some videos. The graphic is a quick look at the platforms on tap for the response here. Big shout out to Rocky Mountain Unmanned Systems and PrecisionHawk for their donation of equipment plus Insitu coming out with a Scan Eagle as part of the resources contributed by Lone Star UAS Center!

FBC policy is to post all their drone video- this worked great during the April 2016 floods where the people manning the phones could tell worried family members to go look at a particular video of the river by a senior assisted living facility.  They are a bit behind in posting but if you are interested some of the videos are now available on the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management YouTube channel.  The missions range from situation awareness of neighborhoods (who’s still there, how severely and long are they going to be cut off before the waters recede) to bridge and dam inspection. Our FSU Center for Disaster Risk Policy team has been flying extensively and even flew off a flat bottom boat.

Hurricane Harvey: How to Fly at Hurricane Harvey

Update: I was reminded to remind everyone about Texas UAV privacy laws – we can’t fly for things like damage assessment without the property owner’s permission unless you are explicitly working for a state agency. Louisiana laws may be different, be sure and check out the rules! Also, we’re rapidly moving out of the immediate life-saving response phase and into the initial recovery phase.
Even before I posted about flying since Friday, we’re getting swamped with requests from pilots asking about i) volunteering to fly for Roboticists Without Borders or ii) about volunteering for an agency or iii) telling me that they are self-deploying and asking where is the best place to go. Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers most people want to hear. I would direct most people to read Disaster Robotics, where in the last chapter I go through working with response professionals.  Flying for a disaster is very different than flying for a job and the best practices and use case aren’t enough  (those assumed you were trained for disasters)- I don’t have time to go through why it is so different, but here are some points to consider:
It’s too late to join Roboticists Without Borders to fly for the Harvey response. Everyone who is deployed with the team has to have been trained and participated in at least one of our disaster exercises before deploying to an incident. Disasters are different, just knowing how to fly isn’t enough. Think about all those cop movies or movies about or special ops like “Zero Dark Thirty,” there’s a whole language, expectations, working conditions, and a whole lot of prior training that’s involved. If you don’t have the equipment, clothing, the training and knowledge of how to fit in, then you slow the whole response down and worse yet may put yourself at risk. One of the reasons we are extended formal invitations to participate in disasters is that we only deploy people who have been trained. We are having a training exercise in November, though we may have another one sooner.
Self-deploying is illegal and unhelpful. The illegal part should be self-explanatory. As I describe in Disaster Robotics, the unhelpful part stems from the agencies being overwhelmed with their tasks and unable to absorb new technologies or anything that changes what they trained for. The idea of flying on your own, then sharing your data is interesting- sadly handing a thumb drive of video to someone at the front desk of an Emergency Operations Center doesn’t ensure anyone will ever see that video. If you read our papers and best practices, you’ll see that managing the data and sorting out what is important for which groups in a response is very important. So just flying and collecting data is maybe 25% of the job. If you aren’t associated with a response agency, you don’t have anyway of doing the other 75% of the job of getting the right information to the right people in time for them to make a right decision. 
 
It is generally too late to reach out an agency and even have them return your call. Again, as pointed out in Disaster Robotics, agencies can’t handle something new or a change in their procedures or anything that impacts manpower; are accountable to the public so must have vetting that the person is good at UAVs AND can work at a disaster; can’t handle the increased footprint (food, shelter, sanitation, gas) of more people. We  sent two team members back on Monday and one on Tuesday from our UMV team because we weren’t using them. We normally have a dedicated data manager but sent them back to further reduce our footprint. There are no gas stations open or hotels that aren’t already booked.
If you are flying at Harvey, even for an agency, be aware of manned and unmanned aircraft and TFRs. The Part 107 exam isn’t sufficient for understanding how disasters work- for example each jurisdiction will have an Airboss, director of Air Operators, and UAS have to coordinate with them. (Justin Adams is serving as AirBoss for Fort Bend.)  TFRs are important. Fort Bend just posted a TFR which the FAA emailed everyone about. The TFR means you can’t fly without explicitly coordinating with the agency posted as holding the TFR (generally the incident commanders designate an agency to manage it- often it is someone from the forestry service).  As you fly in areas without a TFR, there are a lot of tactical helicopter operations and medivac ops plus Blackhawks zooming around at low altitudes that you have to be aware of.  These things don’t show up airmap.io. Plus the use of UAS may not be advertised or posting to social media but many EOCs are using them, for example, CRASAR has been flying all over Fort Bend since Friday but didn’t post anything to social media about until yesterday (because publicity is low priority).
Which leads to, if you are flying, please remind the agency you are working for to check with their ICS staff on the AirOps hierarchy. We’ve seen agencies that fall under the county or city jurisdictions not realize that they need to coordinate their UAV use with AirOps just like they would if they were using a manned helicopter or CAP asset.  And if they promise to pay a UAV team and didn’t follow the hierarchy, they don’t get paid and thus may not pay the UAV team.
Finally be sensitive to the citizens. High resolution images of someone trapped on a roof is moving and compelling video but it can also come across as the pilot trying to benefit from someone’s suffering (even if you aren’t being paid, “likes” on a YouTube count in this category).

Hurricane Harvey: CRASAR deployed since 8/25 to Fort Bend County OEM

Experts in unmanned aerial and marine systems from the Texas A&M’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) have been assisting Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management with Hurricane Harvey. Volunteer teams from the center’s Roboticists Without Borders program arrived on Friday and began immediately using small drones to support rapidly mapping areas at risk and estimating flooding, while another team employed a miniature robot boat with sonar to project river flow rates.   As Harvey hit, the drone teams shifted to surveying tornado damage and identifying neighbors cut off and in need of help. The boat, which is covered with enough floatation to support people and can pull a line to trapped people, has stayed on call for swift water rescue. CRASAR lead pilot, Justin Adams, is serving as Air Operations branch director, coordinating all air operations for manned and unmanned aircraft within the county.

The drone teams are drawn from researchers and students at the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station plus  Adams and Jess Gingrich (USAA). The teams use three different inexpensive DJI platforms.  The EMILY robot boats and experts are provided by Hydronalix, an Arizona company who has been active with CRASAR in humanitarian rescue of boat refugees in Greece, and lead by Capt. John Sims. A drone team from the Florida State University Center for Disaster Risk Policy will join the effort later in the week.

This is the fifth hurricane response that CRASAR has participated in. Under the direction of Dr. Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M, CRASAR was the first group to fly small drones for a disaster, which was at Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The center has been working with Fort Bend County OEM for two years, learning from the county’s diverse emergency professionals on best practices for applying economical unmanned systems to save lives and accelerate economic recovery after a major meteorological event.

Videos from the unmanned system teams will be available through the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management YouTube channel.

Hurricane Harvey: CRASAR deployed since 8/25 to Fort Bend County OEM

Experts in unmanned aerial and marine systems from the Texas A&M’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) have been assisting Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management with Hurricane Harvey. Volunteer teams from the center’s Roboticists Without Borders program arrived on Friday and began immediately using small drones to support rapidly mapping areas at risk and estimating flooding, while another team employed a miniature robot boat with sonar to project river flow rates.   As Harvey hit, the drone teams shifted to surveying tornado damage and identifying neighbors cut off and in need of help. The boat, which is covered with enough floatation to support people and can pull a line to trapped people, has stayed on call for swift water rescue. CRASAR lead pilot, Justin Adams, is serving as Air Operations branch director, coordinating all air operations for manned and unmanned aircraft within the county.

The drone teams are drawn from researchers and students at the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station plus  Adams and Jess Gingrich (USAA). The teams use three different inexpensive DJI platforms.  The EMILY robot boats and experts are provided by Hydronalix, an Arizona company who has been active with CRASAR in humanitarian rescue of boat refugees in Greece, and lead by Capt. John Sims. A drone team from the Florida State University Center for Disaster Risk Policy will join the effort later in the week.

This is the fifth hurricane response that CRASAR has participated in. Under the direction of Dr. Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M, CRASAR was the first group to fly small drones for a disaster, which was at Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The center has been working with Fort Bend County OEM for two years, learning from the county’s diverse emergency professionals on best practices for applying economical unmanned systems to save lives and accelerate economic recovery after a major meteorological event.

Videos from the unmanned system teams will be available through the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management YouTube channel.

Hurricane Harvey: All about how unmanned aerial and marine vehicles have been used for flooding

With Hurricane Harvey approaching, here’s a list of our recent posts about using unmanned aerial and marine vehicles for flood disasters that may be helpful. Also don’t forget our 1 page best practices guides, especially Best Practices for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems for Floods

And yes, Roboticists Without Borders has been requested and is standing up, with Justin Adams as the UAS lead.

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!

New Zealand: what can robots do for a tsunami and quake?

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Kiwis and especially to our colleagues at the New Zealand Fire Service who have been diligently adopting robotics.

So when a tsunami strikes, what can robots do? As was shown at the 3/11 Japan tsunami, unmanned marine vehicles can accelerate economic recovery by inspecting critical underwater infrastructure

[youtube]https://youtu.be/If9BgRRk2bk[/youtube] As was shown by our Japan-US deployments at the invitation of two municipalities at the 3/11 Japan tsunami, unmanned marine vehicles  (UMV) can assist with the response and accelerate economic recovery by inspecting critical underwater infrastructure- the underwater portions of bridges, ports, and shipping channels that are vital for access by responders and for getting supplies to any cut off populations. Later, the UMVs can help with environmental remediation, finding fishing boats and cars leaking gas and oil into pristine fishing waters and identifying other sources of pollution or dangers to fishing and navigation.

UAVs could be used to assess the overall boundaries of the incident, though most of the damage is near the ground. Like flooding, this is hard to get the angles to accurately assess damage. In places such as New Zealand, the agencies (and news media) generally have enough resources to get a general aerial assessment.

 

Dufek wins Best Field Paper Award at IEEE SSRR!

Left to right: Jan Dufek, Dr. Auke Ijspert, Dr. Kamilo Melo
Left to right: Jan Dufek, Dr. Auke Ijspert, Dr. Kamilo Melo

I am proud to announce that Jan Dufek’s paper on using a small tethered Fotokite UAV to control the EMILY unmanned marine surface vehicle to rescue drowning immigrants won the best field paper award at the IEEE International Symposium on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics in Lausanne, Switzerland, last week. Jan is one of my Ph.D. students.  The paper was the preliminary work over the spring semester that is now funded by the National Science Foundation RAPID program.

Jan received 200 Euros

Jan received 200 Euros and his paper will be published as a journal article in Frontiers, a European conference.

More details about the conference are at http://ssrrobotics.org, but there were over 100 attendees from 17 countries. IEEE SSRR is the only conference dedicated

More details about the conference are at http://ssrrobotics.org, but there were over 100 attendees from 17 countries. IEEE SSRR is the only conference dedicated to robots for  homeland security and humanitarian operations. It was established in 2002, with Dr. Howie Choset (CMU) and myself as founding co-chairs.

It was pretty dark so the photo is poor. Jan is on the left with conference chairs Dr. Auke Ijspeert and Dr. Kamilo Melo.