Disasters: the UN report

Been very busy recently. It looks like our group is going to have an independent team looking at UAVs (which is cool). Anyway I've spent some time recently going back-to-basics and having a glance at disaster relief papers to see what sort of requirements might be needed (see my last post).

As a quick addition, here's a nice quote form a UN paper on the issue:

High-resolution imagery—defined here as being able
to see to the level of one meter—has not traditionally
been available at the field level for operating agencies
immediately after a disaster. Imagery can be critical to
making operational decisions, especially in regards
to logistics. But imagery also is time consuming to
process and analyze—a task for which field staff has
precious little time. During the response to the 2004
Indian Ocean tsunami, the UN staff in Aceh had asked
for detailed imagery of bridge outages so that they
could design supply chains around the island. They
had also requested nighttime infrared imagery of the island, hoping that heat of campfires and congregations
of (warm) people would help the UN identify where the
populations of destroyed villages had moved. While
they eventually received some imagery, they never
received a data set that answered their operational
questions.

In the Haiti instance, these images were provided from satellites and overflights, but the requirement for imagery is clearly a vital one, lending credence to the use of UAVs in this way.

Disasters: how to make them less disastrous

It occurred to me yesterday that before coming up with too many esoteric ideas on how to extend the capabilities of a Max-Sum co-ordinated swarm of UAVs, it might be an idea to see if I can find out exactly what first responders might be interested in; and what they need in a disaster area.

To that end, I found a report commissioned in the wake of the Haiti earthquake (see it here) about lessons learned and problems which need addressing. The paper is very broad in scope and deals  in large part with the reconstruction and long-term aftermath of the event, which is not relevant to what I'm studying. There were a number of discussions on the general structure of the relief effort: which is relevant in the sense that it's important to know who might actually be using the final product. It seems that typically relief work is separated into 'clusters' of people who are responsible for certain areas: eg. food, medicine, reconstruction etc etc. They also specifically refer to the work done by ground first responders (USARs) who; in the Haiti case; were grouped into 53 teams which managed to save 211 people.

53 teams inputting different tasks into UAVs would be quite a large task:agent ratio, if one imagines there might be ten or so vehicles in the skies. Clearly this ties in to remarks I read in the earlier paper on extending flight tests to domains where the number of tasks largely outweighs the number of UAVs.

On the software front, it seems language considerations could play a surprisingly important role in rolling out the PDA applications to communicate with the UAVs. Apparently there were even protests against some foreign aid groups who the locals felt were ignoring their cultural and personal considerations. "Ownership" of a relief effort is highlighted as being valuable. In such a case it would make sense that the local first responders (and not just English-speaking international workers) would be able to use the system.

Another software consideration is a system called OneResponse which has been developed as a website to centralise data collection in disaster relief. Basically this was motivated by scattered data being available to different groups in an uncoordinated way in previous scenarios. A centralised repository such as this might be a valuable way of allowing additional parties access to valuable data collected by UAVs.

As much as the paper was a little broader in scope than I was hoping for, it did spur a few ideas about possible utility of the UAVs. Indeed: a section mentioning that initial imagery is currently collected via satellite certainly suggests close-in higher resolution data would be useful. It also got me wondering about the exact nature of the images being collected; would it be worth giving a responder direct control once the UAV was over a target? That way things like angle, and altitude could be adjusted to view things in more detail or more clearly at the discretion of the responder. Something to consider, I think.

-C