Data Fusion and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for First Responders

The commercial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market is dominated by vehicles designed specifically for photography or surveillance. While relatively affordable and readily available, these UAVs have limited effectiveness in the field of emergency response due to limited sensing capabilities. These existing vehicles can be improved through sensor integration to make them applicable to emergency response. In this article, we demonstrate one example of altering an existing commercial-off-the-shelf UAV to assess disasters involving radiation by combining radiation detection, vision, and a global positioning system (GPS). The challenges associated with using low cost commercial UAVs in disaster assessment, including data transmission range, endurance, payload, and control range are also discussed.