Head and neck injury risk resulting from impact with small unmanned aerial vehicles: effect of impact speed, angle, and location

Abstract

It is necessary to analyse the injury risk caused by UAV to establish management standards. A lightweight quadrotor UAV was used to assess the risk of human head and neck injury, taking the impact speed, UAV position, and impact angle into account. First, the MAVIC2 UAV- Hybrid III dummy impacting FE model was developed and verified against the UAV impact tests. Second, lots of simulations were conducted under different impact scenarios to analyse the head and neck injury. Under vertical impact condition, HIC and Nij grew exponentially as the impact speed increased. While under the horizontal impact condition, HIC increased in the form of the power function and Nij increased exponentially. Under vertical impact condition at 20 m/s (maximum flight speed, corresponding to the impact energy of 181.4 J), the HIC was 54% of the threshold, while the Nij was 88% of the threshold, which illustrated that the injury risk of the neck was high, while that of the head was low. Under horizontal impact condition at 20 m/s (181.4 J), the HIC was 51% of the threshold, and the Nij was 24% of the threshold, which illustrated that the injury risk of both the head and neck was low. HIC declined exponentially as the impact angle increased, whereas Nij increased in the form of the power function. Among all the impact positions, the UAV’s arm caused the least injury risk, while the transverse falling attitude between the two arms and the reverse vertical falling attitude generated higher injury risks.