Natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, flood, earthquakes,and wildfires are devastating on population and property losses. Some examplesfrom round our world - earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, Australianfloods, Texas and New Mexico wildfires, hurricane Irene, to name a few. Ingeneral catastrophes were lower than in 2010, costs for damages were higher,almost $380 billion. Economic loss estimates caused by earthquake in Japanreached $210 billion1. It is one of the costliest natural catastrophes of all timeand deadliest of 2011, resulting in more than 15,000 fatalities1. Today concernsare focused on the future, where numbers of victims and damages will occur. Isit possible to save more lives through application of RPA technology? Is it possibleto reduce risks to teams involved in SAR? Is it possible to enhance theoverall mission operation by applying a force multiplier of drones instead ofpeople in harm’s way?This paper presents a future view of how RPAs (Remotely Piloted Aircraft)could assist during a natural catastrophe based on continuous near-real-time(100 msec or less) monitoring - day and night, near-real time planning and reconfiguration,autonomous decision and recognition, near-real time groundmoving element detection and recognition, etc. High level plans are composedby a pilot-in-command at a ground site uploading mission details and target coordinatesto an RPA. When this RPA arrives in the affected area, autonomousflight and mission parameters take over and deploys and controls a swarm ofsmall RPAs that will perform a wide range of operations, like video surveillance,personnel location identification, and Damage Assessment (DA). Similarlythis paper discusses various sensors capabilities needed to support rescue andassessment under differing conditions, which are IR (SW, MW and LW), NVG,LIDAR, SAR and LLLTV.
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