This project conducts research on small unmanned aerial systems while protecting the safety of recovery workers who will be working at the 2014 SR530 mudslide near Oso, Washington, for at least the next year to remediate the site and repair the road. The flights also help increase the safety of residents along other portions of the Stillaguamish River. A small fixed-wing and a rotorcraft unmanned aerial system are used to conduct longitudinal surveys of the inaccessible region of the mudslide and river. The surveys in August and November, combined with earlier flights during the immediate response, capture the evolving state of the mudslide and river over time, validate the models of how the river and mudslide are expected to change over the seasons, refine new geological and hydrological models, and predict the potential for continuing sloughing and flooding that will impact residents and other sections of SR530 in the spring of 2015. The research is providing the robotics and cyber-physical systems communities with small unmanned aerial systems performance data under uncontrolled weather conditions, the human-robot interaction community with how users from different agencies interact with the robot data, and Big Data with datasets to explore how to best archive, curate, and visualize data over time. The research is guiding the design of new small unmanned aerial systems to support applications where rapid or cost-effective geospatial reconstruction of the situation is important, such as emergency response and critical infrastructure inspection.
