Drone Software Donation for Hurricane Recovery

Remote GeoSystems was contacted by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) who was deployed with the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management. All parties involved moved quickly and within a few hours after being contacted, drone video data collection teams were using various versions of the company’s donated LineVision video and photo mapping software to map and view interactive UAV flight tracks with corresponding videos in Esri ArcGIS and Google Earth GIS software. The software is being used to help visualize, distribute, and share the data available from a record 119 UAS flights that CRASAR conducted over 11 days, including 61 flights on a single day.

“We first learned about Remote GeoSystems’ LineVision software for mapping geotagged video from drones about a year ago, and at that time even did a proof of concept demo for the USCG and first responders. Now with the Texas Gulf Coast facing a long and difficult assessment and recovery process and Hurricane Irma bearing down on Florida, it became clear now was the time to deploy this valuable UAV solution to operators and volunteers working the affected areas,” says Justin Adams, Air Operations Branch Director for Fort Bend County Manned/Unmanned Ops and CRASAR director of operations for Harvey. “I have been involved in manned and unmanned aviation for the better part of two decades and Remote Geo offers not only the simplest, but most complete solution for rapid geospatial aerial and ground based disaster assessment and reporting in the industry.”

In addition to supporting the teams in Texas, LineVision is also being pre-deployed to volunteers organized by Florida State University’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Program to help with the Hurricane Irma search and rescue and damage assessment.

Any other volunteer teams, first responders and non-profit organizations providing essential response and recovery services are encouraged to complete the contact form to request free copies of LineVision software for disaster relief efforts.

The LineVision solution is a commercial software suite for UAV, airborne & terrestrial mobile inspection and survey projects requiring geo-referenced video playback, analysis, collaboration and reporting using standard Esri maps and data, Esri ArcMap and Google Earth GIS applications. Using the software, anyone with a GPS-enabled video camera, drone or geospatial DVR that can geotag video in the proper format can immediately load their videos and photos to Esri ArcGIS and Google Earth along with compatible geospatial data.

As the video plays, a position marker moves along an aerial or terrestrial GPS track positioned on a map, continuously indicating where the current frames were recorded. Users may also geospatially “navigate” a video recording by simply clicking a single point along an aerial or terrestrial GPS track. The video then automatically advances to that point in the recording so that users can visually interpret what was recorded at that specific place and time. If something of interest is detected in the video, users may also “snap” an image from the video, which is geotagged and saved for future analysis.

In addition to video, users can import photos and documents from disaster survey and assessment projects. All these imported data types can be saved in a Remote GeoSystems “geoProject™” file for data portability, reporting and future analysis in other versions of LineVision desktop, cloud and server applications.

Key Features Include:

• Play videos from single and multi-camera data collection platforms
• “Click-on-Map” video navigation
• Set a custom geo-fence around the moving position marker
• Load Esri ArcGIS or Google Earth-compatible geospatial data files
• Save video and photo work as geoProjects for simple project reporting, archive and search