STTR Phase I: Subcanopy 3D forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle

STTR 第一阶段：利用无人驾驶飞行器绘制树冠下 3D 森林测绘

• 批准号: 2304303
• 负责人: Erin Linebarger
• 金额: $ 27.49万
• 依托单位: MORPHOBOTICS LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-05-15 至 2024-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2304303&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: STTR; Phase; Subcanopy; 3D; forest

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is a tool to help mitigate the wildfire crisis in the western United States. Prescribed burns are one of the most effective ways to prevent the uncontrolled, large-scale wildfires that devastate entire ecosystems, communities, and economies, but the environmental assessment required for burns may delay the burn by months or years due to overburdened agencies. The innovation addresses this pain point with an automated survey solution, reducing both the paperwork burden and the potential for error in burn area vegetation mapping and spatial fire modeling. The solution ensures that prescribed burn plans use the best available vegetation data, providing fire managers with an accurate prediction of expected fire behavior for determining control strategy, staffing, and resources. This innovation would be the first automated prescribed burn spatial fire modeling solution using an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). This innovation meets the STTR program’s focus on unproven, high-impact innovations because sub-canopy mapping by UAV is a cutting-edge application of autonomous flight, with challenges in optimization and decision-making. The application of UAV technology to prescribed burn environmental assessments will help to address the growing wildfire crisis in the United States by reducing the delay between the decision to burn at a selected site and the execution of the burn. The technical hurdles to be addressed by the proposed project include both real-time, sub-canopy 3D mapping and optimization for constraints across sensor requirements, cluttered environment exploration, and SWAP (size, weight, and power) limitations. The goals are to produce a high-fidelity, open-source. UAV exploration environment, to implement 3D mapping on a resource-constrained computer that meets UAV payload requirements, to incorporate species-specific decision-making criteria into the UAV exploration algorithm, and to conduct validation testing to verify technical and early commercial feasibility. To achieve these goals, the development plan includes a series of milestones following a test-driven, development project management strategy, including simulation testing (software in the loop), tabletop testing (hardware in the loop), and field tests.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这个小型企业技术转移（STTR）I阶段项目的广播/商业影响是一种工具，可帮助减轻美国西部的野火危机。规定的烧伤是防止不受控制的大规模野火摧毁整个生态系统，社区和经济的最有效方法之一，但是由于机构过高，烧伤所需的环境评估可能会使燃烧量降低数月或几年。该创新通过自动调查解决方案解决了这个痛点，减少了文书工作的燃烧以及燃烧区域植被映射和空间火灾建模的可能性。该解决方案确保规定的燃烧计划使用最佳可用蔬菜数据，从而为消防人员提供了对预期的火灾行为的准确预测，以确定控制策略，人员配备和资源。这项创新将是使用自动无人驾驶汽车（UAV）的第一个自动规定的燃烧空间火灾建模解决方案。这项创新符合STTR计划对未经证实的高影响力创新的关注，因为无人机的子镜片映射是自主飞行的尖端应用，在优化和决策方面面临着挑战。无人机技术在规定的燃烧环境评估中的应用将有助于解决美国日益增长的野火危机，从而减少决定燃烧在所选地点的决定与烧伤执行之间的延误。拟议项目将要解决的技术障碍包括实时，子框架3D映射和对跨传感器需求，混乱环境探索以及掉期（大小，重量和功率）限制的限制的优化。目标是产生高保真的开源。无人机勘探环境，在满足无人机有效载荷要求的资源约束计算机上实施3D映射，将特定于规格的决策标准纳入无人机勘探算法，并进行验证测试以验证技术和早期的商业可行性。为了实现这些目标，开发计划包括一系列的里程碑，遵循测试驱动的开发项目管理策略，包括仿真测试（循环中的软件），桌面测试（循环中的硬件）和现场测试。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并认为通过基金会的知识优点和广泛的criteria来评估，这是值得通过评估来进行评估的。