Rivera Pérez, Luz G.

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    Effectiveness of hovering positions of unmanned aircraft vehicles for collecting images and videos of highway traffic
    (2023-12-11) Rivera Pérez, Luz G.; Cruzado-Vélez, Ivette; College of Engineering; Figueroa-Medina, Alberto M.; Valdés-Díaz, Didier M.; Department of Civil Engineering; Ramos-Pérez, Ángela
    The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), known as drones, has been growing in transportation engineering, especially as a method for collecting data. The main objective of this project was to test the effectiveness of drone hovering for the use of drones to collect image and video data for transportation studies, focusing on freeways. Two main sites with the characteristics of the four types of freeway segments (basic, merge, diverge, and weaving) were selected to collect data at different values of drone elevation variables and distance from the road. Two drones were available to collect data: the Autel Evo 2 Pro and the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced, provided by the NICR UPRM research project 4-3 titled Freeway Incident Detection and Management using Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The data collection followed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations and was guided by the protocol developed by the NICR 4-3 project. For the evaluation of the set of variables considered, a survey was conducted between transportation professionals and the general public. The survey included three types of questions: (1) select the better image between two choices, known as AB testing, (2) rate the quality of the image of the road segment using a Likert Scale (excellent, good, fair, poor, or very poor), and (3) select the better video between multiple options. The questions were divided into four sections, one for each type of freeway segment mentioned previously. The results of the survey show that in freeway weaving segments using a drone elevation of 400 ft provides the image and video with better quality. The survey sample also indicates that the Autel drone gives better quality for the field of view of the images and videos. The 300 ft drone elevation was preferred on the survey for both freeway merge and diverge segments. On the basic freeway segment, the 300 ft drone elevation is also preferred as the one with the better view. The Autel drone is the one that provides a better field of view based on the survey results. The distance from the road (DFR) preferred differs in the results. This inconsistency in the variable for distance from the road was due to the different sites’ locations. As seen in the results, for site 1 (PR-52) the 50 ft DFR is preferred and for site 2 (PR-2) is the 100 ft DFR. This study has the potential to train people who do not have any background in transportation topics.