Feasibility Assessment of sUAS-Based Automated FOD Detection System

Airport operations, including foreign object debris (FOD) detection, place a high demand on manpower. At the same time, human (visual) FOD detection is not necessarily reliable. Automation of FOD detection provides an opportunity to improve the detection rate and productivity of manpower. This paper proposes a concept of operations of the automated FOD detection system (AFDS) that employs multiple small multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles carrying commercial-grade electro-optical sensors to scan a runway and compare scan data with a FOD-free image library. The paper presents a graphical-user interface developed for such a system and explains its major functionality, followed by discussing the results of preliminary field assessments of its computational algorithms. Based on these field tests, AFDS overall performance is then evaluated.