Towards "Drone-Borne" Disaster Management: Future Application Scenarios

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Information plays a key role in crisis management and relief efforts for natural disaster scenarios. Given their flight properties, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) provide new and interesting perspectives on the data gathering for disaster management. A new generation of UAVs may help to improve situational awareness and information assessment. Among the advantages UAVs may bring to the disaster management field, we can highlight the gain in terms of time and human resources, as they can free rescue teams from time-consuming data collection tasks and assist research operations with more insightful and precise guidance thanks to advanced sensing capabilities. However, in order to be useful, UAVs need to overcome two main challenges. The first one is to achieve a sufficient autonomy level, both in terms of navigation and interpretation of the data sensed. The second major challenge relates to the reliability of the UAV, with respect to accidental (safety) or malicious (security) risks. This paper first discusses the potential of UAV in assisting in different humanitarian relief scenarios, as well as possible issues in such situations. Based on recent experiments, we discuss the inherent advantages of autonomous flight operations, both lone flights and formation flights. The question of autonomy is then addressed and a secure embedded architecture and its specific hardware capabilities is sketched out. We finally present a typical use case based on the new detection and observation abilities that UAVs can bring to rescue teams. Although this approach still has limits that have to be addressed, technically speaking as well as operationally speaking, it seems to be a very promising one to enhance disaster management efforts activities.

Potential applications of unmanned ground and aerial vehicles to mitigate challenges of transport and logistics-related critical success factors in the humanitarian supply chain

“…When a natural disaster occurs in a populated zone, an agile and effective organization of the disaster management is required to assist the affected population, to minimize the number of victims and to limit the economic impact (Tanzi et al 2016). According to Moshtari and Gonçalves (2016) and Balcik et al (2010), the first hand reliable, adequate, and timely information about the disaster's location, its intensity, the damage it caused to infrastructure and the number of the affected population is significant for the success of relief operation.…”

Towards 3D Simulation for Disaster Intervention Robot Behaviour Assessment

“…The first aim is to understand and model the environment for a successful mission. The second one is to reuse this modelling in a broader decision-making framework by rescue teams (Apvrille et al, 2017;Tanzi et al, 2016). The processed data will be produced by a variety of sensors and deployed in networks for real-time collection (Liu, 2000;Berger, 2002;Shukla, 2016).…”

“…In order to integrate the capabilities of modern sensors, it is necessary to define new approaches. Capturing information helps to (i) understand and thus model the environment (in real-time) for a successful accomplishment of the mission, (ii) reusing the same information for settling decision-making processes for intervention teams (Apvrille et al, 2017;Tanzi et al, 2016). Data are produced by a set of heterogeneous sensors deployed for real-time collection: distance values are computed through ultrasonic, micro-waves and LIDAR sensors, location and attitude values are obtained through Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), control data by odometers (Thrun et al, 2005), etc.…”

“…The usage of Radar for Ground Penetration (GPR) enables new sensing such as detection of victims buried after an earthquake (Chandra and Tanzi, 2015;Li et.al., 2005;Tanzi, 2018, 2017) thus increasing the probability to locate survivors. The usage of Doppler Radar sensors for the detection of survivors under debris has been widely explored in Thi Phuoc Van et al (2019) and in Li et al (2016). Authors propose to locate humans in a non-invasive way, detecting the breath frequency and the heartbeat.…”

Multiobjective Based Resource Allocation and Scheduling for Postdisaster Management Using IoT

“…It is mandatory to hire satellite service for the GIS-based system which is expensive. Disaster management approaches using drones have been proposed in [13,14]. The drone-based system helps in acquiring images of disaster-affected areas, but it does not provide location information along with it, which is generally available using the GIS-based system.…”