Abstract
As government agencies around the globe strive to improve their disaster monitoring capabilities and speed response and recovery efforts, requirements for more accurate and safer data collection mean that Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) are being examined more closely for their potential roles in safely gathering data over those events. Wildfires are consistently one of the most common worldwide “disaster” events, and therefore the wildfire management community is experiencing a surge in UAS interest to support intelligence gathering and pertinent data delivery over those fire incidents. There are numerous, often confusing differences amongst UAS platforms and their sensors. Coupled with the various mission roles required by observation platforms in the wildfire domain, the UAS landscape can be a daunting place for a wildfire manager (or any disaster manager) to select the appropriate UAS solution capability that matches his/her requirements. This chapter describes some of the UAS lessons learned by both the U.S.. Forest Service (USFS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during their C10-year efforts on identifying appropriate UAS wildfire observation capabilities. The agencies, along with the UAS community, have demonstrated the use of both Low-Altitude, Short-Endurance (LASE) and Medium-Altitude, Long-Endurance (MALE) platforms for wildfire sensor intelligence gathering. Those experiences are identified in this chapter as well as an examination of the future direction of UAS systems for supporting the wildfire management community.
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Ambrosia, V.G., Zajkowski, T. (2015). Selection of Appropriate Class UAS/Sensors to Support Fire Monitoring: Experiences in the United States. In: Valavanis, K., Vachtsevanos, G. (eds) Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9707-1_73
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9707-1_73
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