ADAPT: An Open-Source sUAS Payload for Real-Time Disaster Prediction and Response with AI

01/25/2022
by   Daniel Davila, et al.
13

Small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) are becoming prominent components of many humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR) operations. Pairing sUAS with onboard artificial intelligence (AI) substantially extends their utility in covering larger areas with fewer support personnel. A variety of missions, such as search and rescue, assessing structural damage, and monitoring forest fires, floods, and chemical spills, can be supported simply by deploying the appropriate AI models. However, adoption by resource-constrained groups, such as local municipalities, regulatory agencies, and researchers, has been hampered by the lack of a cost-effective, readily-accessible baseline platform that can be adapted to their unique missions. To fill this gap, we have developed the free and open-source ADAPT multi-mission payload for deploying real-time AI and computer vision onboard a sUAS during local and beyond-line-of-site missions. We have emphasized a modular design with low-cost, readily-available components, open-source software, and thorough documentation (https://kitware.github.io/adapt/). The system integrates an inertial navigation system, high-resolution color camera, computer, and wireless downlink to process imagery and broadcast georegistered analytics back to a ground station. Our goal is to make it easy for the HADR community to build their own copies of the ADAPT payload and leverage the thousands of hours of engineering we have devoted to developing and testing. In this paper, we detail the development and testing of the ADAPT payload. We demonstrate the example mission of real-time, in-flight ice segmentation to monitor river ice state and provide timely predictions of catastrophic flooding events. We deploy a novel active learning workflow to annotate river ice imagery, train a real-time deep neural network for ice segmentation, and demonstrate operation in the field.

READ FULL TEXT

page 2

page 5

page 6

page 7

research
05/04/2022

GitRank: A Framework to Rank GitHub Repositories

Open-source repositories provide wealth of information and are increasin...
research
11/19/2021

YMIR: A Rapid Data-centric Development Platform for Vision Applications

This paper introduces an open source platform for rapid development of c...
research
10/07/2018

Hummingbird: An Open-Source Dual-Rotor Tail-Sitter Platform for Research and Education

In this paper, we introduce the Hummingbird: the first completely open-s...
research
03/09/2018

Intelligible Artificial Intelligence

Since Artificial Intelligence (AI) software uses techniques like deep lo...
research
08/31/2023

Njobvu-AI: An open-source tool for collaborative image labeling and implementation of computer vision models

Practitioners interested in using computer vision models lack user-frien...
research
04/18/2021

Modular Procedural Generation for Voxel Maps

Task environments developed in Minecraft are becoming increasingly popul...
research
04/02/2021

An early warning AI-powered portable system to reduce workload and inspect environmental damage after natural disasters

1.3 million household fires, 3,400 civilian deaths, and 23 billion dolla...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset