Emergent Challenges for Science sUAS Data Management: Fairness through Community Engagement and Best Practices Development

Jane Wyngaard,Josip Adams,Lindsay Barbieri,Tom Bell,Sudhir Raj Shrestha,Jens Klump,Christopher Crosby,Don Sullivan,Cynthia Parr,Andrea Thomer

doi:10.3390/rs11151797

Abstract

The use of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) as platforms for data capture has rapidly increased in recent years. However, while there has been significant investment in improving the aircraft, sensors, operations, and legislation infrastructure for such, little attention has been paid to supporting the management of the complex data capture pipeline sUAS involve. This paper reports on a four-year, community-based investigation into the tools, data practices, and challenges that currently exist for particularly researchers using sUAS as data capture platforms. The key results of this effort are: (1) sUAS captured data—as a set that is rapidly growing to include data in a wide range of Physical and Environmental Sciences, Engineering Disciplines, and many civil and commercial use cases—is characterized as both sharing many traits with traditional remote sensing data and also as exhibiting—as common across the spectrum of disciplines and use cases—novel characteristics that require novel data support infrastructure; and (2), given this characterization of sUAS data and its potential value in the identified wide variety of use case, we outline eight challenges that need to be addressed in order for the full value of sUAS captured data to be realized. We conclude that there would be significant value gained and costs saved across both commercial and academic sectors if the global sUAS user and data management communities were to address these challenges in the immediate to near future, so as to extract the maximal value of sUAS captured data for the lowest long-term effort and monetary cost.

Highlights

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems— known as Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), or often colloquially as ‘drones’—are rapidly becoming a ubiquitous tool for data collection across a wide range of private and public applications worldwide
Emerging from the above described engagement efforts have been two key results: (1) how small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) data are unique and in part require a measure of custom data management solutions, and (2) eight challenges that would need to be addressed in order for the full potential value of sUAS data to be accessed
3.1. sUAS Data Are Unique and in Need of Unique Management Infrastructure sUAS data are uniquely 5+ dimensional All sUAS data are associated with a location in both time and 3-dimensional space

Summary

Introduction

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS)— known as Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), or often colloquially as ‘drones’—are rapidly becoming a ubiquitous tool for data collection across a wide range of private and public applications worldwide. This application space includes multiple academic fields (electrical, chemical, and civil engineering; environmental sciences; and others) for which sUAS are changing how and which data are captured. In many cases the former requires and includes the latter

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