Browse Topic: Disaster and emergency management
This paper discusses uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can have additional applications beyond their respective civilian, industry, or military applications. The increasing popular electric UAVs in advanced air mobility (AAM) and urban air mobility (UAM) networks can be utilized to increase the efficiency and impact of emergency response in both urban and remote settings. The paper will explore the design considerations and requirements for these dual-use vehicles for specific public good missions, while presenting a survey of additional public good missions that could significantly benefit from additional ready-to-go drones. Additionally, this paper aims to explore the logistics required to implement a system for incorporating civilian, industrial, and military drones into a reserve fleet for emergency and disaster relief efforts.
This paper considers the opportunities and challenges of supporting Disaster Relief and Emergency Response (DRER) missions employing new aerial vehicle and systems concepts. This paper is a broad survey of the possible aerial-vehicle-assisted approaches to aid in DRER missions. The intent of this paper is to elevate this DRER mission application domain as a critical area of investigation for rotorcraft, robotics, intelligent systems, and other research. Current work is primarily focused on assessing air space integration challenges for Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) aerial platforms (typically small multirotor drones and/or small fixed-wing uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs)) in disasters such as earthquakes and wildfires. Though this is an important area of investigation, truly efficient and effective DRER systems and response efforts will not be possible without the development of novel aircraft, technologies, and system architectures of COTS DRER drones/UAVs. This paper seeks to
This paper presents the design, development, and subscale flight testing of an optionally-autonomous lift-plus-cruise (LPC) eVTOL aircraft for emergency response missions that bridges the gap between existing aerial capabilities and the needs of first responders. A 4+1 LPC configuration consisting of four vertical lift propellers and a single pusher propeller was selected to balance hover performance and cruise efficiency. The vehicle is sized around a 600 lbs gross takeoff weight with a 125 lbs payload capacity. VTOL and Pusher propeller blades were optimized using parametric studies, resulting in a high Figure of Merit and propulsive efficiency. Trim analysis demonstrates efficient hover to cruise transition, lift-to-drag ratios of 10-11 between 70-90 knots, and propulsive efficiency exceeding 0.9 at the cruise speed of 100 knots. The subscale configuration utilized a simulation framework for trim and optimization of flight control laws, which were subsequently implemented on a 1/3
A novel multirotor concept is proposed for airlifting the emergency medical personnel without the use of a rescue helicopter (designed for patient transport) during the first line emergency services. Based on this concept, two configurations are designed and introduced, comprising a common quadrotor system with single and dual pusher propellers, respectively. An initial flight performance assessment is conducted for the introduced configurations by means of trim calculations in two distinctive flight modes across the entire designated flight speed range, initially without rotor-rotor interactions, and subsequently, with their inclusion. For this purpose, an existing mid-fidelity rotor-rotor interaction method is extended to capture the interactions in all three directions between the rotors that are arbitrarily positioned and oriented to each other. The trim calculations including rotor-rotor interactions show a 10% increase in the vehicle power at the maximum flight speed. The
Dufour Aerospace designs and manufactures an automated tilt-wing aircraft for critical cargo delivery missions. Emphasizing operational efficiency, the platform integrates path generation and tracking techniques tailored for the unique dynamics of tilt-wing flight and builds upon the existing lower level control. While there exist a myriad of methods for high-level aircraft automation ranging from PID to MPC, they often require a trade-off between complexity and the capability to handle non-linear dynamics of the system they are controlling. Hence, a lightweight, deterministic geometric path generation approach using clothoid-based transitions between three waypoints and a robust SO(3)- based path tracking controller adapted for tilt-wing dynamics are presented. Additionally, a high-level automation framework is introduced that includes failure mode handling for GNSS loss and communication breakdowns. This system ensures mission continuity and operational safety while supporting
Automated vehicles, in the form we see today, started off-road. Ideas, technologies, and engineers came from agriculture, aerospace, and other off-road domains. While there are cases when only on-road experience will provide the necessary learning to advance automated driving systems, there is much relevant activity in off-road domains that receives less attention. Implications of Off-road Automation for On-road Automated Driving Systems argues that one way to accelerate on-road ADS development is to look at similar experiences off-road. There are plenty of people who see this connection, but there is no formalized system for exchanging knowledge. Click here to access the full SAE EDGETM Research Report portfolio.
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