A UAV Search and Rescue Scenario with Human Body Detection and Geolocalization

Abstract

Abstract. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) which can operate autonomously in dynamic and complex operational environments is becoming increasingly more common. The UAVTech Lab 1 , is pursuing a long term research endeavour related to the development of future aviation systems which try and push the envelope in terms of using and integrating high-level deliberative or AI functionality with traditional reactive and control components in autonomous UAV systems. In order to carry on such research, one requires challenging mission scenarios which force such integration and development. In this paper, one of these challenging emergency services mission scenarios is presented. It involves search and rescue for injured civilians by UAVs. In leg I of the mission, UAVs scan designated areas and try to identify injured civilians. In leg II of the mission, an attempt is made to deliver medical and other supplies to identified victims. We show how far we have come in implementing and executing such a challenging mission in realistic urban scenarios.

Vision based victim detection from unmanned aerial vehicles

“…The work of [12] comes particularly close to ours in that it also addresses victim detection from UAVs. The authors propose to utilize a thermal camera to pre-filter promising image locations and subsequently verify them using a visual object detector.…”

“…Leveraging complementary information of different types of sensors was recently proposed in the context of autonomous victim detection [12], [24]. The work of [12] comes particularly close to ours in that it also addresses victim detection from UAVs.…”

“…The authors propose to utilize a thermal camera to pre-filter promising image locations and subsequently verify them using a visual object detector. While in [12] people lying on the ground are assumed to be in upright poses, in our paper we address the significantly more complex problem of detecting arbitrarily articulated people. Note that the results of our work can still be used in combination with thermal camera images, which similarly to [12] can be used to restrict the search to image locations likely to contain people or to prune false positives, which contain no thermal evidence.…”

Distributed model predictive control for unmanned aerial vehicles

“…Multi-agent systems are gaining more and more attention since they can be utilized in a wide range of applications, such as search and rescue missions [1], [2], space exploration [3], [4], security patrols [5], [6], tra c control [7], [8], agricultural vehicles [9], garbage collection [10], mapping and land mine removal [11], [12].…”

Optimal placement of UV-based communications relay nodes

“…where the objective function Our interest in this problem is motivated by the communications relay problems common, for instance, in robotics [2][3][4]16,17,19,21,27,[30][31][32]34], where it is required to survey some target located in t and convey the gathered information back to a base station located in s. One or more unmanned aerial or ground vehicles (UAVs or UGVs) are used as relays. The set X is defined by the terrain within the area of interest.…”