Use of Tethered Small Unmanned Aerial System at Berkman Plaza II Collapse

Abstract

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

Overcoming the Challenges of Using Unmanned Aircraft for Bridge Inspections

“…The method of operating a tether-powered UAS has been implemented but with been obtained [38]. The CRASAR was not granted a COA since the miniature helicopter was not involved in search and rescue [38].…”

“…The CRASAR was not granted a COA since the miniature helicopter was not involved in search and rescue [38]. As a result, the miniature helicopter was attached to a 45 m (150 ft) tether to comply with FAA regulations.…”

Findings from NSF-JST-NIST Workshop on Rescue Robotics

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Reconfigurable swarm robots for structural health monitoring: a brief review

“…The Robotic Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University has recently developed an aerial robotic infrastructure analysis system called the Aerial Robotics Infrastructure Analyst Project (ARIA 2017) to rapidly model and analyze civil infrastructures using small, low-flying robots. The main limitation with this type of robots is the limited payload capacity, and thus cannot carry many sensors (Pratt et al 2008). Fumagalli et al (2012) studied the modeling and control of a flying robot for remote inspection of industrial plants for contact inspection.…”