Drone Zones - Humanitarian UAV coordination
People's Choice Nominee
Drone Zones - Humanitarian UAV coordination received a People's Choice Nomination.
Create an app that will enable small drone operators to know more about specific weather parameters, local terrain and no fly zones within a five-mile radius of their GPS location.
Synopsis
Our solution is a javascript driven web app interface that helps disaster relief organisations coordinate the efforts of private UAV Drone pilots who volunteer to help survey affected areas.
It allows an organisation (like the UN for example) to automatically assign the coordinates for a specific survey zone (within a larger affected area) to each registered drone pilot. This helps prevent many different drone pilots from operating in the same area and "overlapping" each other. It also helps mitigate the possibility of collisions as each pilot has his or her own perimeter to work within.
The app also indicates zones with red borders that might currently have a "No Fly" status (proximity to air fields or other political restrictions). Zones with challenging weather conditions are also displayed with an orange border.
Client Use - https://ec2-52-62-171-230.ap-southeast-2.compute.a...
A UN coordinator (or similar humanitarian client) logs in under any username (no password required at the moment in the prototype)
They would then define the top left and bottom right coordinates of the larger affected area that they are working with in order to define the entire affected area to be surveyed. (These are currently hard coded into the prototype solution to display the UTS campus, but would be captured through input fields in the next iteration)
The client would then enter the x and y dimensions of the smaller survey zones they require within the affected area (also hard coded in the prototype at this point).
Finally they click the Initialize Map button to generate the map grid which is automatically subdivided into individual zones according to the the dimensions specified.
The light red zones are available for assignment. (Red borders indicate a "no fly" zone and orange shows a "weather caution")
Clicking on a light red zone will make that zone available to the next drone pilot to log into the system. The zone will change from red to green to indicate the change in status.
Pilot Use
A registered pilot would receive a notification of the assignment (via SMS or email) and log into the platform with a mobile device (iPad or iPhone).
They would then receive the zone assigned to them in a zoomed in graphic format.
The interface would display the perimeter of their assigned zone as well as a GPS pointer indicating the current location of their UAV drone to help them remain within their specified perimeter.
Our Slide Deck presentation:
