Category: Press Releases

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!

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.

Emergency Managers Find Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Effective for Flooding and Popular With Residents

A paper to be presented next week at the IEEE International Symposium on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics in Lausanne, Switzerland, details the use of small unmanned aerial systems in two recent Texas floods in Fort Bend County, a major Houston suburb and 10th largest populated county in Texas. The 21 flights over four days provided flood mapping and projection of impacts, helping the county prepare and respond to the floods. Surprisingly, the flights did not encounter public resistance and the videos became a popular and useful asset for informing the county residents as to the state of the flooding. A pre-print is available here.

The small unmanned aerial systems were deployed through the Roboticists Without Borders program of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue for two flood events in April and May 2016. Both events were presidential declared disasters.  Experts from DataWing Global, CartoFusion Technologies, USAA, and Texas A&M embedded with the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management and the Fort Bend County Drainage District to fly low-cost DJI Phantoms and Inspires. The flights provided flood assessment including flood mapping and projection of impact in order to plan for emergency services and verification of flood inundation models, providing justification for future publicly accountable decisions on land use, development, and roads.

The paper, titled Two Case Studies and Gaps Analysis of Flood Assessment for Emergency Management with Small Unmanned Aerial Systems by Murphy,  Dufek, Sarmiento, Wilde, Xiao, Braun, Mullen, Smith, Allred, Adams, Wright, and Gingrich, documents the successful use of the small unmanned aerial systems for the two. It discusses the best practices that emerged but also identifies gaps in informatics, manpower, human-robot interaction, and cost-benefit analysis.

The annual IEEE International Symposium on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics was established in 2002 by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. It is the only conference dedicated to the use of ground, aerial, and marine robots for public safety applications. It typically attracts 60-150 researchers, industrialists, and agency representatives from North America, Europe, and Asia. This year’s conference will be held at Lausanne, Switzerland, see http://ssrrobotics.org/ for more information about the conference.

The TEES Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue is the leader in documenting, deploying, and facilitating technology transfer of unmanned systems for disasters. It has inserted robots or advised on the use of robots at over two dozen events in 5 countries, starting with the 9/11 World Trade Center and including Hurricane Katrina and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.

For more information contact:

 

Justin Adams, US Datawing and UAS lead for Roboticists Without Borders, justin.adamas@datawinglobal.com , 832.653.1057

Dr. Robin Murphy, director for the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, robin.r.murphy@tamu.edu, 813.503.9881

For Hurricane Matthew: Quick Guide For Agencies Flying small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) for Emergencies

The illustrated version in pdf is here.

This quick guide is aimed at helping emergency managers quickly determine how they can exploit small unmanned aerial systems (like quadcopters).  The guide covers our best understanding of who can fly?  where can they fly?, and  any additional considerations in planning. Our best practices series has other documents on what kind of data you can expect to get, flight duration, etc., but this guide is about how the new regulations impact emergency managers. It is based on our SUAS deployments since 2005 and lessons learned from deployments by our colleagues.

 

WHO CAN FLY?

 

If members of your agency own a small UAS or have friends with a small UAS, they cannot fly at the disaster- even if they aren’t asking for money. The FAA has repeatedly ruled that a) disasters are a business or government activity and  b) if the UAV flight is a donation to a business or government, it is the same thing as if the business or government agency flew directly.

 

Therefore, the only people/companies who can fly are those with a:

  • Part 107 license. The license is new and many people/companies don’t have these yet.
  • 333 exemption. Essentially a business license versus of the COA. Many hobbyist declared themselves a company to get a 333.
  • COA. Essentially a government or academic license.

 

Your agency does not have to have the 107, 333, or COA– just formally invite the group to fly on your behalf. If the group has one of the above, there are three important caveats.

 

1. Controlled airspace. They can fly at a disaster in uncontrolled airspace, but will need special permissions for controlled airspace. Keep in mind, many densely populated areas will be in controlled airspace.

 

2.  They have to obey all the flight restrictions for their license, including Temporary Flight Restrictions. Getting permission to fly under a Temporary Flight Restriction does not give them permission to change up the rules, it only means that they are now coordinated with the rest of the air traffic who will expect them to obey the same rules as in normal flights.

 

3. 24 hour notifications before flights may be required.  If the group is flying under a 333 or COA, they have to post an online notice of intention to fly in a specific area, called a NOTAM, 24 hours in advance. So if you think you are going to have a group fly, have them declare as soon as you know. There is no downside to filing a NOTAM and then not flying.

 

 

WHERE CAN THEY FLY?

 

For planning purposes there are 3 types of airspaces: uncontrolled, controlled, and TFR.  Uncontrolled means they can fly anywhere that is not controlled according to their license. TFR was covered above. That leaves the controlled airspace.

 

You can quickly determine if an area you want a group to fly in is in controlled airspace by going to:

 

https://app.airmap.io/

 

and enter the nearest town, then click the appropriate boxes.  What is “Controlled airspace” and what you have to do to get permission to fly in it will depend on whether the group has a) a Part 107 license or b) a 333 exemption or COA.

 

a. Determining Part 107 controlled airspace.  If the group has a 107, click on the menu on the left that says Controlled Airspace and “all”. You will get something like this:

 

 

 

 

Anything in shade means that it is controlled airspace. This means that they can fly only IF they have an airspace authorization that they have applied for in advance online and gotten approval. Note: the FAA system is backlogged by weeks, so for Matthew, this may not make possible to get approval fast enough.

 

b. Determining 333 or COA airspace.

 

Clear airmap and instead click on “blanket COA”. You should get something like this:

 

 

 

Any area in orange means that the airspace is off limits without additional permissions- no matter what altitude you are flying at.  The controlled airspace is due to airports. A local group may already have permission to fly in those areas, but may not. If not, permission to fly in controlled airspace on short notice is handled through an Emergency COA, also called ECOA, process. The process takes about 1 hour to get through the FAA- assuming you have the GPS coordinates of where you want to fly, the COA number, etc.

 

The key is that the tower has to approve the flights (actually the approve the process of letting them know where you’re flying, when you take off, land, etc.) and the FAA has to agree to the temporary extension of the current license.

 

  • Note about 333 exemption. ECOAs are granted only to businesses or agencies, not individuals doing business as. Too many quasi-hobbyists were trying to fly at disasters without working with a response agency.

 

 

ARE THEY ANY OTHER CONSIDERATIONS?

 

There are three considerations:

 

  • Data. The data (images, video) really belongs to your agency and needs to be handled as such. It may have personal identifying information. Some groups may routinely post videos and images to the web or tweet, which might not be appropriate. Therefore, you may want to make clear what the data management policies are applicable to flights on your behalf.

 

  • Privacy, state laws, or other regulations plus the public perception.  There may be state or local rules that impact the use of SUAS. Regardless, if you have a group flying SUAS for disasters, the residents will need to be aware that they are legitimate- plus the teams will be magnets for residents asking for help or assistance. So you will probably want to plan to have an agency representative in uniform or vest with the team.

 

  • Some SUAS may be software disabled from flying in TFR areas. DJI Phantom 3 and Inspires, which are very common, are now disabled by the manufacturer when a TFR is in place. So that may be something to discuss with your SUAS team.  DJI does have a procedure that allows agencies to override the software and fly up to 1.5 nautical miles from an airport, trusting the group to have obtained permissions.