H NASA αξιολογεί ένα δομικό τεχνολογικό πρόγραμμα STEReO δίνοντας έμφαση στην αποτελεσματική διαχείριση των drones, αλλά και σύγχρονων τεχνολογικών λύσεων στην αντιμετώπιση έκτακτων αναγκών.

“…When a natural disaster occurs, an impressive number of participants are often needed to help with the response. Consider just the number of different aircraft that might be involved in fighting a wildfire: tankers releasing fire retardant, lead planes to guide them, helicopters dropping off field crews, aircraft from which smokejumpers arrive on the scene… And that’s to say nothing of the activity taking place on the ground. Responding to an emergency like this – or a hurricane or search and rescue effort, to name a few – requires extensive collaboration among a host of groups that, right now, is coordinated manually under challenging conditions.

This makes communication difficult. New technologies have great potential to assist emergency responders, but they also bring new challenges. For instance, unmanned aircraft systems, commonly called UAS or drones, could make firefighters’ interventions faster, more targeted and better able to adapt to changing environments.

However, these aircraft also demand special air traffic management, onboard tools to let them operate independently and safely, and expanded communications to keep everyone aware of what’s happening in the sky and on the ground.Working to tackle these challenges and more is the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project, or STEReO, led by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

By building on NASA technologies and expertise and bringing together solutions from multiple agencies involved in disaster response, STEReO aims to make an impact greater than any solution could have on its own. The work, which is a collaboration between Ames and two other NASA centers – Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio – is a concept study under NASA’s Convergent Aeronautics Solutions initiative. The results of the CAS study, designed to determine STEReO’s feasibility, will be used to determine whether and how NASA will pursue further development…”