The grant will support drone operations within federal, state, and local public safety agencies and emergency services organizations.
FREMONT, CA: The U.S. Department of Commerce has awarded a federal grant to Airborne International Response Team (AIRT), the chief 501(c)3 organization supporting Drones For Good for emergencies and disaster response. The grant will support drone operations within federal, state, and local public safety agencies and emergency services organizations.
According to Adam Jacoff, the NIST's Emergency Response Robotics Project project leader, "The first step toward evaluating aircraft capabilities and credentialing remote pilot skills is to get everybody onto the same measuring stick. That is where standard test methods can play a key role. Especially across public safety, industrial, commercial, and even recreational pilots. All need to demonstrate essential maneuvers to maintain positive aircraft control while performing whatever payload functionality is necessary to successfully perform the intended tasks."
The grant money will be used by AIRT's DRONERESPONDERS program to help enforce standard test methods for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a way to assess aircraft capabilities objectively, concentrate training with remote pilot proficiency measures, and support pilot credentialing.
"Our collaborative research and development effort with DRONERESPONDERS will validate the tests with public safety drone operators across the nation," said Jacoff. "It should also facilitate mutual aid between responder organizations deployed to large-scale disasters by enabling objective measurement and comparison of particular aircraft capabilities with the associated remote pilot proficiency. The results will help guide deployment decisions and align expectations while improving overall safety within the national airspace system."
NIST has created several sUAS tests that can be built with materials available in most big box home improvement stores and installed on-site as required. DRONERESPONDERS can assist interested organizations in fabricating test apparatuses and conducting test trials correctly so that any entity can use the resulting performance scores to determine minimum proficiency levels based on their chosen aircraft, airspace, and mission complexities, and the environmental conditions in which they expect to deploy.
"The Standard Test Methods for sUAS developed by NIST are the most applicable and easy to use mechanism we have seen for evaluating basic skill levels of public safety remote pilots in concert with the capabilities of their UAS systems," said Chief Charles Werner (ret.), Director of DRONERESPONDERS. "Our focus now will be on helping public safety agencies across the nation both understand and adopt the NIST tests."
Katie Thielmeyer, UAS Program Manager and firefighter/paramedic with the Woodlawn (Ohio) Fire Department, has been chosen to lead this project by DRONERESPONDERS. Thielmeyer will be the DRONERESPONDERS Program Manager, where she will be in charge of overseeing the national integration of these tests and supporting various AIRT outreach activities within the responder community.
"I am excited to expand my role with DRONERSPONDERS and work closely with the NIST team to make a positive impact within the public safety UAS sector," said Thielmeyer. "This new partnership will provide benefits to public safety agencies and emergency services organizations at every level who operate Drones For Good."
