Evaluation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Flood Risk Management : Field Experiment Conspectus

Abstract

The 2017 Duck Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Pilot Experiment was designed to evaluate existing and new UAS-based survey and monitoring techniques beneficial to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Flood Risk Management (FRM). The diverse array of UAS sensors (lidar, multispectral packages, and high-resolution cameras) can collect data to estimate topography, bathymetry, terrain, land cover, vegetation, and structures at high temporal and spatial resolution. The experiment took place on 5-24 June 2017 at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Field Research Facility. Nine UAS flight teams from the federal government, academia, and the private sector conducted 180 UAS flights with 10 different UAS platforms as well as 2 traditional fixed-wing plane overhead surveys. The UAS flights combined for over 2,782 minutes of air time across estuarine, dune, beach, and nearshore environments, including various types of natural features and man-made infrastructure. Such datasets provide the foundation for quantitatively comparing the pros and cons of different platforms, sensor packages, and processing techniques against each other as well as traditional survey methods. This special report summarizes the cooperative June 2017 UAS for FRM pilot field experiment; sections detail participating groups, airframes, field preparation/field operations, and data dissemination. DISCLAIMER: The contents of this report are not to be used for advertising, publication, or promotional purposes. Citation of trade names does not constitute an official endorsement or approval of the use of such commercial products. All product names and trademarks cited are the property of their respective owners. The findings of this report are not to be construed as an official Department of the Army position unless so designated by other authorized documents.

Evaluation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems for flood risk management : results of terrain and structure assessments

“…Figures The use and utility of UAS for different applications continue to grow alongside advancements in design, component miniaturization, navigation, and sensor resolution (e.g., FAA DronzeZone 2020). As a result, UAS have the potential to fill the gap between ground-based survey techniques and traditional manned aircraft or satellite remote-sensed observations for a number of US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) mission requirements (Bruder et al 2018;Padua et al 2017). The flexibility and cost-effectiveness of UAS have provided potential for generating imagery that supports high-resolution point clouds and digital surface models (DSMs) that compare to lidar-generated point clouds (e.g., Turner et al 2016;Brodie et al 2019b).…”

Post-Irma unmanned aircraft system (UAS) coastal storm impact surveys

“…Without onboard RTK-GPS, the region of most accurate image-derived UAS data will be constrained to the region within the GCPs. Data collected at the 2017 Duck UAS Pilot Experiment (Bruder et al 2018) should provide additional insight into the compared accuracies of the airborne lidar and UAS data. As expected, the JALBTCX airborne lidar and UAS data products differed in data coverage and density.…”

Evaluation of unmanned aircraft system coastal data collection and horizontal accuracy : a case study at Garden City Beach, South Carolina

“…Recently, USACE has identified a need to evaluate unmanned aircraft system (UAS) technology to support flood risk management applications, examining data collection and processing methods and exploring potential for coastal capabilities, including ecosystem characteristics, which are a critical component to resiliency and recovery (Bruder et al 2018;Suir et al 2018). As part of this research need, an initial field experiment was held at the USACE Field Research Facility in Duck, North Carolina, in which multiple agencies, academia, and private industry conducted a coordinated UAS and field data collection campaign in June 2017 (Bruder et al 2018). During this experiment, a variety of sensors and platforms were operated with coordinated ground and air missions to better compare imagery and derived data products to inform flood risk management tools and models.…”