Webinar 52
US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and USDOT Volpe: Using Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) for Federal Land Management Agency Road Inspections

March 20, 2024

Summary of the Federal Highway Administration’s Quarterly Webinar

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) promotes geographic information systems (GIS) as a means to manage and improve transportation systems more effectively. One of the ways that FHWA does this is through its GIS in Transportation program,¹ which identifies timely and critical GIS issues and topics in transportation and connects transportation agencies with available resources and best practices. The webinar summarized here is part of a quarterly series organized through the GIS in Transportation program.

Remi Work, Program Analyst, Volpe Center, U.S. Department of Transportation presented on a project which identifies how data acquired by uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) might be integrated with existing road condition rating approaches. The project, Alternative Approaches to Inspections for Federal Land Management Agency (FLMA) Roads: Using Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) to Support Road Inventory Program, is a collaboration between the Volpe Center, FWS and FHWA, Federal Lands Highways (FLH). They also partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey to fly UAS equipment and acquire lidar data and high-resolution imagery. The UAS demonstration was conducted at Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge in Alamosa, Colorado. Using the data, the Volpe Center team applied methods to automate road distress detection and perform a road condition analysis. The resulting road condition ratings were compared to ratings for the same roads derived using more customary approaches. The final report includes recommendations for how UAS can be incorporated into the current FWS road data collection process.

A recording of the webinar is available. Please use passcode 8$hWEz9i to access it.

Questions & Answers

You did this for the Fish and Wildlife service, but it’s Federal Lands that does the Road Inventory Program. How receptive were they (Federal Lands) to this whole project and the idea of using UAS?
A lot of people who do this on the ground, their day-to-day work is doing the actual manual road inspections, so their reaction was, “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. Would it really make this process better if we already have a process that is working?” But the project’s way to view it is through the lens of how implementing a UAS into the current manual inspection could make that inspection better, and not replace the manual inspection.

There are certain regulations and consideration regarding flying a drone in an area. What are some of the things that needed to be in place before flying the drone?
It was a lengthy process that involved conversations with a lot of people to determine where the drone would be flown. A request for a special permit needed to be submitted to be able to fly. There are a lot of limitations as to where you can fly a drone. It took time to decide the type of camera and equipment to use, and where and when to fly the drone, and who is going to fly it. There are a lot of limitations on drone types. A federal agency, and any of their contractors or consultants, must use drones that are compliant with the National Defense Authorization Act. That is for projects using federal dollars. The Department of Defense puts out a list called the Blue List, which lists different platforms. It makes sure no component of a drone platform is coming from a country that may have some kind of adversarial nature to the United States.

Do you anticipate similar restrictions for State Agencies that do work using Federal dollars?
A state agency is not beholden to the federal rules per se unless the federal government gives them money to do the work. The Fish and Wildlife Service is in the Department of Interior and they have their own restrictions as well to get administrative use to be allowed. The Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, does not have the same restrictions.

Will there be additional studies/trial programs to continue this research by Volpe?
We did a study that came out last year, a global benchmarking study, where we looked at various countries, and how they were using UAS specifically for inspecting structures. Volpe helped us write that report, and that’s out. And it has to do with the use of small UAS to study infrastructure. This was focused on doing routine inspection maintenance on structural elements.

Are there weather constraints for drone surveys, and are these the same as for on-the-ground surveys of road conditions?
Zekial Rios, Head of survey group at the Office of Federal Lands Highway answered: If it’s heavy rain or snow, our surveyors can go out and work. The people who are doing Road Inventory Report can go out and work. But if it’s heavy rain or snow, you are not going to want to put a UAS platform out there for the safety of the people flying it and also you don’t want to damage the platform. Some of these platforms are very expensive. On the first day of this project the flight plan had to be altered because it was too windy. This should be taken into account for each use case and any sort of cost or time savings.

The project used two types of flights—LIDAR and photogrammetry. Was it the same drone that did that?
No, we used Yellow Scan for the LIDAR, which was from USGS, and we used Federal Highways Delta X for the photogrammetry. The LIDAR system has a camera on it but is a fairly low resolution. That is used to colorize the LIDAR cloud, but you can’t do photogrammetry off it. Central Federal Lands flew their Alta X with a Sony A Seven traditional camera on it to get much higher quality images. So two separate platforms are used because together they would be too heavy per FAA rules and technology limitations.

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