A cooperative multi-robot team for the surveillance of shipwreck survivors at sea

Abstract

The sea as a very extensive area, renders difficult a pre-emptive and long-lasting search for shipwreck survivors. The operational cost for deploying manned teams with such proactive strategy is high and, thus, these teams are only reactively deployed when a disaster like a shipwreck has been communicated. To reduce the involved financial costs, unmanned robotic systems could be used instead as background surveillance teams patrolling the seas. In this sense, a robotic team for search and rescue (SAR) operations at sea is presented in this work. Composed of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) piggybacking a watertight Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities, the proposed cooperative system is capable of search, track and provide basic life support while reporting the position of human survivors to better prepared manned rescue teams. The USV provides long-range transportation of the UAV and basic survival kits for victims. The UAV assures an augmented perception of the environment due to its high vantage point.

Distributed Uav-Swarm-Based Real-Time Geomatic Data Collection Under Dynamically Changing Resolution Requirements

“…While a lot of research was undertaken regarding the autonomous landing of UAVs in general, few studies have been directed at marine environments where the challenges are more complex or circumstances are more dramatic compared to land or indoor environments. Recently, quadrotor UAVs have been landed with reasonable accuracy on swimming objects and under outdoor conditions (Mendona et al, 2016). The abilities to perform complex maneuvers and to operate as large collectives of units, especially for efficient situational awareness (Erdelj et al, 2017), are going to continue to increase rapidly over the next years.…”

Survey on Communication and Networks for Autonomous Marine Systems

“…USVs can also be used as carriers or support of other types of unmanned vehicles (e.g. UAVs [71][72][73][74], AUVs [75]) or act as communication relays between over-the-air/satellite communication and underwater vehicles/structures [8], or as data-mules [24].…”

Performance comparison of consensus protocol and l-&phi approach for formation control of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots

“…A group of robots can be used for accomplishing many tasks such as moving large awkward objects, terrain model acquisition, planetary exploration, surveillance applications [8,9,10,11]. Formation of mobile robots control methods can be partitioned into three class approaches: virtual structure approach [12,13], behavioral approach [14,15] and the leaderfollower approach [16,17,18].…”