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

这项小型企业技术转让（STTR）第一阶段项目的更广泛/商业影响是帮助减轻美国西部野火危机的工具。处方烧伤是防止不受控制的大规模野火最有效的方法之一，这些野火会破坏整个生态系统、社区和经济，但由于机构负担过重，烧伤所需的环境评估可能会将烧伤推迟数月或数年。该创新技术通过自动化测量解决方案解决了这一问题，减少了文书工作负担，减少了在烧伤区域植被测绘和空间火灾建模中出现错误的可能性。该解决方案确保规定的燃烧计划使用最佳的可用植被数据，为火灾管理人员提供准确的预测，以确定控制策略、人员配置和资源。这项创新将是第一个使用自主无人机（UAV）的自动规定烧伤空间火灾建模解决方案。这一创新满足了STTR项目对未经验证的高影响力创新的关注，因为无人机的下冠层测绘是自主飞行的前沿应用，在优化和决策方面面临挑战。将无人机技术应用于规定的燃烧环境评估，将通过减少在选定地点进行燃烧的决定和执行之间的延迟，有助于解决美国日益严重的野火危机。拟议项目需要解决的技术障碍包括实时、次冠层3D映射和传感器需求约束的优化、混乱环境探索以及SWAP（尺寸、重量和功率）限制。我们的目标是制作一个高保真的开源软件。无人机探索环境，在满足无人机有效载荷需求的资源受限计算机上实现三维测绘，将特定物种的决策准则纳入无人机探索算法，并进行验证测试，验证技术和早期商业可行性。为了实现这些目标，开发计划包括一系列里程碑，遵循测试驱动的开发项目管理策略，包括模拟测试（循环中的软件）、桌面测试（循环中的硬件）和现场测试。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.