Quantitative Data Analysis: CRASAR Small Unmanned Aerial Systems at Hurricane Harvey

This paper summarizes the 112* flights by nine models of small unmanned aerial systems at Hurricane Harvey and presents four recommendations for further research and development. This was the sixth reported deployment of sUAS for a hurricane or flooding disaster by public officials during the immediate response and recovery phases. This deployment is particularly interesting because it was the largest number of flights up to that time, was conducted by a county government that already had sUAS and a sUAS policy, had a suite of 14 models of sUAS to choose from, and used sUAS for four different mission types. This paper analyzes the quantitative data from the flights in terms of missions, objectives, choice of sUAS, choice of control style, manpower, flight duration, operations tempo, and data products. The data is also considered by phase, showing that First Person View was used exclusively for the preparedness and response phases (the first 8 days) and preprogrammed mapping flights were requested only during the infrastructure recovery phase. In addition to the findings, the paper makes four recommendations for additional research. The Harvey datasets are available to the scientific community for further analysis.