The SHERPA project: Smart collaboration between humans and ground-aerial robots for improving rescuing activities in alpine environments

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to present the foreseen research activity of the European project "SHERPA" whose activities will start officially on February 1th 2013. The goal of SHERPA is to develop a mixed ground and aerial robotic platform to support search and rescue activities in a real-world hostile environment, like the alpine scenario that is specifically targeted in the project. Looking into the technological platform and the alpine rescuing scenario, we plan to address a number of research topics about cognition and control. What makes the project potentially very rich from a scientific viewpoint is the heterogeneity and the capabilities to be owned by the different actors of the SHERPA system: the human rescuer is the "busy genius", working in team with the ground vehicle, as the "intelligent donkey", and with the aerial platforms, i.e. the "trained wasps" and "patrolling hawks". Indeed, the research activity focuses on how the "busy genius" and the "SHERPA animals" interact and collaborate with each other, with their own features and capabilities, toward the achievement of a common goal.

A Survey on Aerial Swarm Robotics

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Area coverage with heterogeneous UAVs using scan patterns

“…Off-the-shelf UAV platforms available today are capable of carrying sufficient payloads and offer reasonable flight times. They are becoming a solution of choice in search and rescue operations covering large operational areas (several km 2 ) such as rescue operations after a tsunami or searching for lost persons in a mountain environment, such as described in the SHERPA project [13]. A common mission in such scenarios involves gathering information (e.g.…”

A Systems-Of-Systems Conceptual Model and Live Virtual Constructive Simulation Framework for Improved Nuclear Disaster Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Mitigation

“…UAVs are rapidly being adopted through systems engineering for disaster response agencies ( Tomaszewski et al 2015). Engineering and technology advances in unmanned system now allow rotary-wing missions previously manned to be accomplished using rotary-wing unmanned aerial systems (RUAS) (Saggiani and Teodorani 2004;Farradyne 2005;UTM 2007;Bernard et al 2008;McGonigle et al 2008;Alexis et al 2009;Marconi et al 2012;Mase 2013). Unmanned systems include aerial systems, submersible unmanned systems (Oikawa 2015), maritime unmanned surface vehicle (USV) technology (Campbell et al 2014;Sharma et al 2014;Svec et al 2014) and ground based systems that may "walk" like a person or animal (Hsu 11/2014;Oikawa 2015).…”

“…These models are all specialized to produce high fidelity predictions of very specific components of fuel and reactor behavior, accident progression, radionuclide transport, and dosing and some do so with fairly fast run times (NRC 2015a). Literature on operations research, nuclear power plants, nuclear reactor accidents and simulation is vast with (Saggiani and Teodorani 2004;Farradyne 2005;Bernard et al 2008;McGonigle et al 2008;Peräjärvi et al 2008;Alexis et al 2009;Flint et al 2009;Girault et al 2010;Ianovsky and Kreimer 2011;Alver et al 2012;Marconi et al 2012;Towler et al 2012;Ai-Omari et al 2013;Chaimatanan et al 2013;Mase 2013Mase , 2015Holden and Dickerson 2013;Liu et al 2014;MacFarlane et al 2014;Ouyang et al 2014;Hu et al 2015;Sheng et al 2015;Wang et al 2015b) being but a few examples. Many of these works utilize simulation techniques, due in part to the complex nature of UAS and their environmental interactions and the difficulty in analytically evaluating real-world systems (Law and Kelton 2000).…”