Enhancing unmanned flight operations in crisis management with live aerial images

This paper presents the design and execution of a flight experiment in 2015, which was designed to investigate new technologies for crisis management by using a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) demonstrator for airborne image collection. Based on an assumed crisis scenario, which simulates a severe flooding that caused road damages and enclosed people in water, several aspects of crisis management were tested and validated. Aerial images were collected and sent to the ground in two flight phases with different objectives. The focus of this paper is to present the technical set-up of the experiment and involved systems, an overview of different scan and search patterns, the realization of flight plans using these patterns, and the actual execution of the experiment in two phases. Examples for the usage of live images in ground systems are presented. The contribution of such a system to crisis management is discussed, and current legal limitations are taken into account. An overview of upcoming experiments and developments of the involved systems is given.