[youtube]https://youtu.be/Mt_dJN3rmSc[/youtube]CRASAR was in the field from Monday and Tuesday (May 30-31, 2016) at the request of Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management, with Roboticists Without Borders member CartoFusion providing off-site data support.  We flew a small UAS (DJI Phantom 3 Pro) throughout the county to help them validate their flood inundation models, conduct hydrological forensics, and educate the public on why evacuations were necessary. This is our third response to flooding this year (Louisiana March, Fort Bend County April, and this event) and we continue to learn about missions, selection of sUAS, and crew organization and CONOPS building on my previous recommendations for flooding.  I am working on a formal cognitive work analysis using the shared roles model but some preliminary lessons that may be of use to other teams are discussed below. We’d like to especially thank Jeff Braun, Lach Mullen, Adam Wright, and Juling Bao from Fort Bend County. Traci Sarmiento served as VSO both days, Xiaosu Xiao and Grant Wilde took turns being data manager, and I was the pilot.

RWB member Hydronaulix also offered Texas Task Force 1 the use of five EMILY swiftwater rescue robots that we used in Greece (see NPR story here) but they weren’t needed.

Six distinct missions have emerged from working with emergency managers:

Choosing the type of sUAS

The majority of missions for sUAS (versus larger UAS that can fly higher and longer areas) are expert-in-the-loop missions (more formally called remote presence), where the expert wants to be able to view the video and then direct the sUAS to a better view. It is not clear that orthomosaics and digital elevation maps (DEM) are a priority. The emergency managers generally have DEM already (though they may be outdated) and the areathat they want to look at is so large that a sUAS team is unlikely to reach all of the areas if restricted to line of sight operations— this is where larger UAS or Civil Air Patrol can be of great value. Another problem is that the file size of orthomosaics is unwieldy for OEMs to handle, share, and post among themselves. Not that many mangers have laptops that can handle a 55GB file and the upload times are slow. We have converged on quadcopters being the default platform because of expert-in-the-loop flying and because of the physical constraints of landing zones, though we don’t rule out fixed wing. In the field there is limited access to the area because of the flooding. Access points such as raised roads or levees also had high tension powerlines which can induce interference- indeed, we had one “whoa!” takeoff next to powerlines. (We won’t discuss the creepy horde of swarming insects making it unsafe to stand in one potential site, or the fire ant bites I am sporting from a misstep at another site.)  Flying near rivers or from residential areas is hard because of trees and power lines. Empty lots without trees are rare, especially in older and urban parts of town, though suburban areas may have soccer fields suitable for launching and recovering fixed-wing sUAS.

Manpower: Crew Organization and CONOPS

This is my area of research, so it is always of interest to me! As noted in previous blogs, my TED talk, and papers, it’s the data that is the barrier to adoption. We’ve converged on a 4 person field team plus dedicated data management team back at the base to handle the data. Gee, that sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Well, it is better than accidentally writing over data or taking extra hours to get data products to the OEM.  

• pilot, who is in charge of the sUAS
• visual safety officer, who is not allowed to look at the pilot’s display or do anything but eyes on the sUAS and sky (and given the number of manned aircraft zipping by at low altitudes, that is an important and full time job)
• agency expert, who actually knows what to look for and to opportunistically direct the flight
• data manager, who immediately backs up the data (hard lesson learned at the 9/11 World Trade Center robot deployment) and makes sure all data is logged and stored for immediate hand-off to the OEM (want to give them that thumb drive as soon as sneaker net permits)