Quantifying risk of ground impact fatalities of power line inspection BVLOS flight with small unmanned aircraft

Abstract

Abstract-One of the major challenges of conducting operation of unmanned aircraft, especially operations beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS), is to make a realistic and effective risk assessment. An important part of such an assessment is to identify the risk of fatalities, preferably in a quantitative way since this allows for comparison with manned aviation to determine whether an equivalent level of safety is achievable. This works presents a method for quantifying the probability of fatalities resulting from an uncontrolled descent of an unmanned aircraft conducting a BVLOS flight. The method is based on a standard stochastic model, and employs parameterized high fidelity ground impact distribution models that accounts for both aircraft specifications, parameter uncertainties, and wind. The method also samples the flight path to create an almost continuous quantification of the risk as a function of mission flight time. The probability of fatality is determined for a Talon model aircraft on a power line inspection mission.

Ground impact probability distribution for small unmanned aircraft in ballistic descent

“…This allows operators to systematically have a safety assessment of each flight, either for the purpose of adhering to flight regulation or flight restrictions, or to form the basis for a application for dispensation when existing regulation does not allow a particular type of flight, such as BVLOS. The use of the ballistic descent model is exemplified in [25] to evaluate the risk of a power line inspection BVLOS flight operation with a Talon model aircraft.…”

“…Obviously, the ballistic descent is not the only flight terminating event that must be considered since an unmanned aircraft can descent uncontrolled in other ways, such as a glide due to lost power or a fly-away. Two examples of a complete calculation to achieve the flight fatality rate are given in [25] and [4]. An implementation of the descent model equations from Section II-C may be found in the CasEx python package.…”

Two-Layer Routing for High-Voltage Powerline Inspection by Cooperated Ground Vehicle and Drone

“…Furthermore, a cloud-based architecture was established to enable real-time video streaming and facilitate communications [31]. There is also a research on the risk assessment of the drone in the powerline inspection process [32].…”

Evaluating Ground Risk for Road Networks Induced by UAV Operations

“…A very good overview of existing approaches and comparison of the risk models developed can be found in [6]. This type of approaches has been used to assess the risk of UAV operations such as power line inspection [7] or railways monitoring [8].…”