, Hurricane Wilma, a category 5 storm, made landfall at Cape Romano, Florida. Three days later, the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at the University of South Florida deployed an iSENYS helicopter and a prototype unmanned water surface vehicle, AEOS-1, to survey damage in parts of Marco Island, 14 km from landfall. The effort was the first known use of unmanned sea surface vehicles (USVs) for emergency response and established their suitability for the recovery phase of disaster management by detecting damage to seawalls and piers, locating submerged debris (moorings and handrails), and determining safe lanes for sea navigation. It provides a preliminary domain theory of postdisaster port and littoral inspection with unmanned Journal of Field Robotics 25(3), 164-180 (2008) vehicles for use by the human-robot interaction community. It was also the first known demonstration of the strongly heterogeneous USV-micro aerial vehicle (MAV) team for any domain. The effort identified cooperative UAV-USV strategies and open issues for autonomous operations near structures. The effort showed that the MAV provided a muchneeded external view for situation awareness and provided spotting for areas to be inspected. Concepts of operations for USV damage inspection and USV-MAV cooperation emerged, including a formula for computing the human-robot ratio:where N h is the number of humans and N v is the number of vehicles. The outstanding research issues span three areas: challenges for USVs operating near littoral structures, general issues for USV-MAV cooperation, and new applications. It is expected that the lessons learned will be transferrable to defense and homeland safety and security applications, such as port security, and other phases of emergency response, including rescue.C 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This field study examines vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) small unmanned aerial system (SUAS) operations conducted as part of an 8-day structural inspection task following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. From the observations of the 32 flights spread over 12 missions, four key findings are identified for concept of operations (CONOPS) and the next level of artificial intelligence for rotary-wing SUASs operating in cluttered urban environments. These findings are (1) the minimum useful standoff distance from inspected structures is 2-5 m, (2) omnidirectional sensor capabilities are needed for obstacle avoidance, (3) global positioning system waypoint navigation is unnecessary, and (4) these operations require three operators for one SUAS. Based on the findings and other observations, a crewing organization and flight operations protocol for SUASs are proposed. Needed directions in research and development are also discussed. These recommendations are expected to contribute to the design of platforms, sensors, and artificial intelligence as well as facilitate the acceptance of SUASs in the workplace. C 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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A tethered Small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) emergency. As the IP3 was being used for forensic structural provided structural forensic inspection of the collapsed Berkman inspection, not for saving lives, the FAA declined to grant Plaza II six-story parking garage. The sUAS, an iSENSYS IP3 the waiver. However, tethered flight to 45m is permissible miniature helicopter, was tethered to meet US Federal Aviation . . ' Administration (FAA) requirements for unregulated flight below under Federal Aviaton Regulaton (FAR) Title 14 §101.15 and 45 m (150 ft). This created new platform control, human-robot iSensys modified the IP3 and worked out new flight strategies interaction, and safety issues in addition to the challenges posed [2]. by the active, city environment. A new technique, viewpointThis paper describes the first known fielding of a tethered oriented Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA), was used to generate sUAS and the lessons learned. The sUAS was successful in the 4:1 human-robot crew organization and operational protocol.The sUAS over three flights was able to provide useful imagery that it provided the engineers sufficient information, but as to structural engineers that had been difficult to obtain from would be expected with a first use, the data was not exhaustive manned helicopters due to dust obscurants. Based on these in nature, but merely preliminary. flights this work shows that tethered operations decreases teamThe paper also further documents the challenges of using effectiveness, increases overall safety liability, and in general is sUAS in close urban operations, which present highly complex not a recommended solution for sUAS flight, flight conditions and wind shear. Fig. 1 shows some of the

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