UAS Collision Injury Research

Vehicle operations in dynamic environments have inherent risks to the occupants. Whether these risks are associated to whole body injury from an emergency landing or to the neck for a passenger seated in a side-facing aircraft seat, mitigation techniques must be developed. This is also true when trying to assess the safety consequences of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) impact to a non-participating bystander. In 2016 the Federal Aviation Administration published the Part 107 rule covering the operations of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS). One of the limitations imposed was the prohibition without further considerations on the operations over people. The rule identified that research was needed to ensure safe operations. The first step to develop injury mitigations for these bystanders is to quantify the associated risks. Oftentimes, this is through the application of risk curves that relate the probability of injury of a specific body region to some quantifiable input that can be measured during a test. This test is to replicate the potential conditions; in this case, it would be for head and neck injury from blunt impacts. The end goal is then to develop a test methodology by which a UAS product can be evaluated. These risk curves then become directly connected to the injury criteria, and because of this, there is a process that is followed in their development. This rigorous process involves seven different steps: defining the injuries, defining the environment, specifying the input energy, conducting specific testing to generate injuries, regression analysis, development of test procedures, and verification. The resulting injury criteria can then be used to assess the safety of a system and used for conducting trade studies. How each of these steps applies to the development of a methodology for determining the effects of a UAS impact to a bystander will be explored to demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology. Data from several research projects were collected, and a notice of proposed rule making was published. This rule identified the data necessary and from this, the proposed testing methodology was developed. It involves characterizing the types of injuries and using these to baseline a simplified test methodology using either a rigid flat plate or an instrumented anthropomorphic test device.