This article presents a vision for future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)-assisted disaster management, considering the holistic functions of disaster prediction, assessment, and response. Here, UAVs not only survey the affected area but also assist in establishing vital wireless communication links between the survivors and nearest available cellular infrastructure. A perspective of different classes of geophysical, climate-induced, and meteorological disasters based on the extent of interaction between the UAV and terrestrially deployed wireless sensors is presented in this work, with suitable network architectures designed for each of these cases. The authors outline unique research challenges and possible solutions for maintaining connected aerial meshes for handoff between UAVs and for systems-specific, security- and energy-related issues. This article is part of a special issue on drones.

Help from the Sky: Leveraging UAVs for Disaster Management

Wireless Sensor Networks and Multi-UAV systems for natural disaster management

The fast-paced development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and their use in different domains, opens a new paradigm on their use in natural disaster management. In UAV-assisted disaster management applications, UAVs not only survey the affected area but also assist in establishing the communication network between the disaster survivors, rescue teams and nearest available cellular infrastructure. This paper identifies main disaster management applications of UAV networks and discusses open research issues related to UAV-assisted disaster management.

/pdf/uav-assisted-disaster-management-applications-and-open-4709umhycx.pdf

UAV-assisted disaster management: Applications and open issues

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00801220/document

Terrain traversability analysis methods for unmanned ground vehicles: A survey

This paper presents a complete review of computer vision algorithms and vision-based intelligent applications, that are developed in the field of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the latest decade. During this time, the evolution of relevant technologies for UAVs; such as component miniaturization, the increase of computational capabilities, and the evolution of computer vision techniques have allowed an important advance in the development of UAVs technologies and applications. Particularly, computer vision technologies integrated in UAVs allow to develop cutting-edge technologies to cope with aerial perception difficulties; such as visual navigation algorithms, obstacle detection and avoidance and aerial decision-making. All these expert technologies have developed a wide spectrum of application for UAVs, beyond the classic military and defense purposes. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Computer Vision are common topics in expert systems, so thanks to the recent advances in perception technologies, modern intelligent applications are developed to enhance autonomous UAV positioning, or automatic algorithms to avoid aerial collisions, among others. Then, the presented survey is based on artificial perception applications that represent important advances in the latest years in the expert system field related to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In this paper, the most significant advances in this field are presented, able to solve fundamental technical limitations; such as visual odometry, obstacle detection, mapping and localization, et cetera. Besides, they have been analyzed based on their capabilities and potential utility. Moreover, the applications and UAVs are divided and categorized according to different criteria.

Survey of computer vision algorithms and applications for unmanned aerial vehicles

In May 2012, two major earthquakes occurred in the Emilia-Romagna region, Northern Italy, followed by further aftershocks and earthquakes in June 2012. This sequence of earthquakes and shocks caused multiple casualties, and widespread damage to numerous historical buildings in the region. The Italian National Fire Corps deployed disaster response and recovery of people and buildings. In June 2012, they requested the aid of the EU-funded project NIFTi, to assess damage to historical buildings, and cultural artifacts located therein. To this end, NIFTi deployed a team of humans and robots (UGV, UAV) in the red-area of Mirandola, Emilia-Romagna, from Tuesday July 24 until Friday July 27, 2012. The team worked closely together with the members of the Italian National Fire Corps involved in the red area. This paper describes the deployment, and experience.

https://www.dfki.de/web/forschung/publikationen/renameFileForDownload?filename=SSRR2012.pdf&file_id=uploads_1902

G-J M. Kruijff

Papers

Rescue robots at earthquake-hit Mirandola, Italy: A field report