UAS for Situation Assessment in Disaster Relief Operations

Abstract

Unmanned Flight Operations become increasingly important in both civil and military applications. In the European project DRIVER (Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience), new technologies for Crisis Management (CM) are developed and improved. The project’s aim is to increase resilience in a local, national, and international context in a crisis situation. The utilization of airborne collected sensor data is of great importance for the management of a CM mission. This imagery can be used to support and enhance e.g. logistic planning processes, to detect people in danger, or to identify important intact infrastructure, such as possible landing zones for helicopters. Here, unmanned systems will play an important role in future search and rescue operations. Various platform types have already shown their great potential in missions that require rapid surveillance capabilities or logistic support. This contribution reports about experiments and results of the European Projects DRIVER. In addition further applications and mission planning and execution support for UAS in crisis response are presented.