Almost everything that we've built can be
affected.
Everything that we rely on: water, infrastructure,
the roads, highways, railroads.
So when there is a major natural disaster
such as an earthquake, flood, hurricane, tornado
there is an area that is impacted.
Many times what we do as researchers is we
go to these areas to look, to understand what
exactly happened and learn from that experience.
Typically that's a kind of a difficult process
because you have always limited resources,
we don't have a lot of good technical information
about what happened so that's why we're there,
and so what we're exploring this project is
the opportunity of using drones that can be
sent from a launching point, collect data
on what has happened, review that data hopefully
in an automatic way, and send people to the
appropriate areas that now we know are of
the most scientific interest.
We collect video and photos to create 3D models,
this is what we're after, 3d models of whatever
feature it is.
By taking photos that have significant overlap
with each other you can actually start looking
at all the sides and the entire 3d target.
And so if you have overlapping photos you
can start recreating the 3d model, and perform
any type of measurement that we want in 3d
space.
The traditional way by which we were doing
things would be for us to go on top of this
feature, use a measuring tape or maybe a GPS
which can be dangerous, can be tremendously
time consuming, and can actually in the end
cost a lot in terms of the amount of time
and resources you need to allocate.
The drones can go there and could do the same
much faster, with better resolution, with
much more data than we would normally.
By having good quality data of what happened
in the field we use that data to recalibrate
our models, our design procedures, the way
we handle stability issues, safety of structures,
landslides, and revise these procedures so
we can actually improve them in the future.
I think there are tremendous opportunities.
The drones could be sent there as the first
agents to map this type of feature.
I've been to a number of reconnaissance following
disasters in the past.
You do your homework to the degree that you
can from media, social media and you land
on the ground and you have to go to where
you think based on the information you have
is the most important sites.
You could be wrong.
It could take you days you know because the
roads are closed the infrastructure is not
there, there is no water, there could be a
fire, there could be other disasters.
You won't know until you get there.
And so our vision is that in the future in
the near future we'll be sending ten drones
or more in different directions, collect data,
process that with automatic or semi automatic
routines, find the hot spots, and then send
people in these hot spots to do the mapping
that we're interested in.
This technology, properly used actually can
help scientists like myself make leaps forward.
And this is an evolving field, and I'm hoping
that scientists can use this new technological
tool for the public good.
