AT409 Week 6 Report

 

Introduction:

This week we conducted another series of flights for William Weldon at the Purdue Wildlife Area (PWA). Like in pervious flights of this type, the objective was to use traditional (visual) and digital search methods in combination with a UAS platform to perform a simulated search and rescue operation. 5 flights were planned for that day but, only 3 were flown due to the laptop battery being depleted.

Metadata:

Date	9/29/20
Location	Purdue wildlife area
Vehicle	DJI Mavic 2
Sensor	1” CMOS
Dataset	1
Takeoff time
Landing time
Altitude	119m
Sensor angle	NADIR
Overlap	80%
Sidelap	80%

 

Overview:

The setup of the scenario was a search and rescue operation modeled in a condensed multi-crew manner. There was a flight team, search coordinator, search ream, and recovery team. Normally these groups would be physically separated with the search coordinator running the show and coordinating between various search elements and first responders. Being as this was only a simulated event, there are no first responders and there is no physical separation of the groups; however, we still acted in accordance with how it would be done were it real. I was assigned to the visual search team, for which my duty was to use photo imagery collected by the flight crew and visual scan the images looking for the simulated missing person, in this case represented by a red shirt and jeans placed at a random location within the search area.

During the first flight the digital search team found and identified he missing person several minutes before I was able to with the visual method. After that the recovery team would be directed to the missing person via instructions given by the search team, the person would be recovered and then the test was restarted. In the subsequent test I was able to visual identify the missing person at nearly the same time as the digital team; and during the final test I was able to find the missing person in less than 1 min of receiving the image data and beginning the search. While I do not have access to data to confirm this, I would suspect this was due to the fact that as we flew subsequent flights I began to get familiar with the area, and began to develop a sense of what I should and should not expect to see in the images and was able to quickly notice when something was there when in previous flights it had not been.