Infrastructure protectionDrones to help assess post-disaster infrastructure damage
Drones can be used for a number of applications including civilian and military purposes. Monitoring and surveillance are two of the biggest uses for drones. Now, researchers are utilizing similar technology to develop an operational prototype that will use innovative remote sensing approaches and cameras mounted on low cost aircraft or unmanned drones to detect and map fine scale transportation infrastructure damage such as cracks, deformations, and shifts immediately following natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. The researchers hope the technology becomes the new, Department of Transportation approach to monitoring infrastructure after natural disasters.
Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have become increasingly popular over the last half dozen years or so among amateur aeronautical aficionados, engineers and generally anyone fascinated with relatively inexpensive flying machines.
Drones can be used for a number of applications including civilian and military purposes. Monitoring and surveillance are two of the biggest uses for drones.
Now, researchers at the University of New Mexico, along with collaborators at San Diego State University and BAE Systems, are utilizing similar technology to develop an operational prototype that will use innovative remote sensing approaches and cameras mounted on low cost aircraft or unmanned drones to detect and map fine scale transportation infrastructure damage such as cracks, deformations, and shifts immediately following natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.
A UNM release reports that with the help of a two-year, $1.2 million grant from the United States Department of Transportation Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research & Technology Commercial Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Technologies Program (CRS&SI) and additional support from the UNM College of Arts and Sciences and UNM School of Engineering, researchers Christopher Lippitt and Susan Bogus Halter are conducting the research project.
“We’ve been working on basic technology for really fast and precise change detection by aligning images to each other before a disaster and immediately after an event to detect anything that changed,” said Lippitt, an assistant professor in Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. “We’ve been working on that in a number of applications for a while, but this is the first time we’re fully operationalizing technology that myself and my collaborators at San Diego State have been developing for many years.”
One of the keys to infrastructure damage assessment is timeliness. Many natural disasters create dangerous situations that are time-sensitive in nature. The first twenty-four hours are oftentimes critical in terms of damage assessment, search and rescue. Short time-frame damage assessments, sometimes over large urban areas, can be difficult with the current conventional, ground-observations and sensor networks researchers say.
The solution to this post-hazard information access challenge is to design flexible, ready-to-deploy, time-sensitive remote sensing systems (TSRSS) based on a network of airborne platforms and digital cameras (manned aircraft in the short term and unmanned aircraft long term).
