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Princeton, British Columbia - Universal Wing conducted multiple unmanned flight missions successfully with its latest advancements in the (GIDE) project, a UAV-based Geo-Intelligent collaborative Decision Support System for Real time Disaster and Emergency Management. Upon implementation, the system will radically advance Canadian emergency response capabilities and help save human lives by providing safe, timely, critical information and intelligence to disaster managers. Universal Wing has been working together with Geosys Technology Solutions and its partners since 2007 on this project.
Universal Wing responsibilities include:
The following information is from the Project Plan and Statement of Work according to GIDE:
Background
During catastrophic events where whole communities are at risk, there is a yet unsatisfied need to capture and distribute geospatial data and information in real-time to disaster managers and decision makers, who require it to inform optimal responses in the form of warnings, evacutations, rescue, relief or damage control. For many types of disaster, up-to-date visual images and other remotely sensed data are of central importance in planning the response. Unfortunately, this data is costly to acquire, both in the time required before exploitation and monetary price, and may also pose a significant danger to the remote observer, which is typically a manned aircraft. The alternative is satellite sensing; however, this type of data is not available for capture on demand, and can suffer from atmospheric conditions, such as cloud cover. Remote sensing challenges aside, raw imagery alone provides limited value to decision makers, as it requires a prohibitive human interpretation effort, is unwieldly to manipulate and share with collaborating response agencies and may quickly become obsolete as the disaster evolves.
The devastating Hurricane Katrina of August 2005 serves as a 21st century illustration of the problem. A recent report produced by the US Government Accountability Office cited the long delay in assessing the situation and lack of coordination as two of the five most serious impediments to the disaster response. In actuality, emergency agencies received new image-based maps (orthophotos) daily of the affected regions, which were delayed only by 24 hours from acquisition by plane (Connor, 2006). This turnaround is impressive by conventional digital mapping standards but is woefully inadequate for real-time decision making. Furthermore, the image data alone is of little value, as it requires extensive and inherently slow human analysis before informed decisions can be derived from it. In the case of Katrina, the data was disseminated to each responder agency independently, resulting in redundancy and a lack of collaboration. The response lacked a medium for agencies to jointly analyze the data, which would have allowed them to leverage their collective experience to quickly gain situational awareness and begin coordinating a coherent response.
The project will leverage advances in machine vision and UAV technology to capture imagery covering a disaster area and to process it into geo-intelligent information in real-time. By exploiting wireless modern telecommunications and internet technologies, this data will be delivered immediately to disaster agencies in an intuitive web interface that facilitates inter-agency collaboration. When a disaster calls for a complex joint response, multiple individuals from multiple organizations will share a view of the disaster, and be able to communicate elaborate plans amongst each other. The primary project outputs will be an advanced UAV image acquisition payload with wireless communications ability, a mobile high-performance processing system with new algorithms for robust, human intervention-free orthophoto production, and a web-based application expediting the distribution of information to responder agencies and enhancing their collaboration.
GIDE will drive Canadian innovation in key global markets, especially in disaster management, remote sensing and mapping. GIDE will drive Canadian innovation in key global markets, especially in disaster management, remote sensing and mapping. Due to the unpredictability of disasters, it is impossible to ascribe a precise dollar figure to the market’s size; however in time of crisis, responder agencies’ budgets are raised proportionally to the disaster’s severity. In BC, for example, forest fire budgets are unconstrained, increasing to meet instantaneous needs. During the high-profile 2003 wildfires near Kelowna, the estimated annual budget of $55 million escalated to actual spending of $375 million as the response urgency grew.