EarthData proposes an innovative approach to providing real-time surveillance imagery and greatly improving response times for tasking multiple remote sensing aircraft to acquire critical map-based products required for crisis support. A mobile ground based acquisition planner inputs the acquisition needs into a GIS system preloaded with basic (pre disaster) information of the response area. Using heads-up GIS-based point-&-click tasking over the base map layers, a tasking list is generated and visually coded, from which sensor tasking is automatically sent to available remote sensing aircraft for task prioritization and execution. Tasks are quantified in terms of benefit to (overall) situation awareness; the most beneficial tasks are allocate to available aircraft. This benefit is allocated to individual aircraft by a dynamic programming algorithm on the basis of aircraft availability and sensor resources, forming an integrated acquisition schedule. Sensor tasking and status update is provided by a low bandwidth data link, allowing adaptive real time reallocation of already deployed aircraft to the ever-changing needs of a fluid and chaotic disaster area. Some of the collected data that is urgently needed for situation awareness is dynamically selected for immediate download over a high bandwidth data link. Critical data is packaged with its ancillary pointing, motion, and GPS position/timestamp data, and contextually compressed to save transmission bandwidth. Sensor data received from all the reporting remote sensors are placed into local network attached storage for dissemination. The ground-based planner recognizes that the acquisition request has been completed, so it removes the completed task from the request queue placing it into a database for archival storage. EarthData's commercialization model provides for both a service and product model. EarthData would be service provider using the technology developed under this SBIR. Under the product model, technology developed would be marketed to other commercial mapping firms and the federal government. The system components will be loosely coupled. In this way they can be marketed as an integrated package or individual components.
