Posted 16 Sep 2013 | 14:42 GMT
[Image: http://i.imgur.com/u6MGSli.jpg]
There's been some terrible, terrible flooding going on in Colorado. Rain is still falling, making it difficult (or impossible) for airplanes and helicopters to get in and out of the area. Drones can fly, though, and while they're not able to pick up people or drop off supplies, they are able to make damage assessment maps to help relief agencies coordinate their efforts. Or at least, they were, until the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) showed up and grounded them.
Falcon UAV is a Colorado company that makes a fixed-wing UAV (called a Falcon) that uses GPS and cameras to autonomously generate (among other things) highly accurate maps of the ground. The UAV is hand-launched, with an endurance of about an hour, and generally operates between 300 and 1,500 feet above the ground. It has public safety flight approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly in some parts of Colorado. Basically, the point here is that we're not talking about some random dude with a quadrotor flying around taking pictures: the Falcons are designed for (and governmentally approved for) mapping missions in public airspace.
[video=youtube;lILQ8bDSMWY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lILQ8bDSMWY[/video]
For the last three or four days, Falcon UAV has been volunteering with the Boulder County EOC (Emergency Operations Center) to coordinate mapping flights around the towns of Longmont and Lyons, just northeast of Boulder. This is the kind of thing they end up with, with a turnaround time of just a few hours from launching the drone to delivering a high resolution, georeferenced map:
[Image: http://i.imgur.com/GMLPl8m.jpg]
It's tiny, I know, but you can see a subset *.gif here and download a full version for Google Earth here.
So yeah, it seems like that would be kind of handy to have, especially since the UAVs can fly even when manned aircraft are grounded by weather, like last Thursday afternoon when the Falcon was the only aircraft that managed to get into the air at all.
And then, over the weekend, FEMA showed up. (...)
More (with links, etc): http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/falcon-uav-provides-colorado-flooding-assistance-until-fema-freaks-out
tl;dr: FEMA threatened to arrest anyone flying these drones, even though they were approved by the FAA and the local government, and were actually being used in coordination with the local government (Boulder County EOC) to help manage the rescue efforts.
wat