Since our last blog post dedicated to the Micro Indoor drones (MINs) development, our partners from SINTEF have been able to participate in several Laboratory Integration Tests (LITs) and Small Scale Tests (SSTs) and show that the swarm of MINs can now incrementally deploy themselves and provide a localization possibility for First Responders (FRs).
One of the technical objectives of INGENIOUS is to develop an autonomous drone for unsupervised exploration and assessment of high-risk environments. This Multi-purpose Autonomous eXploring drone – MAX – navigates by itself in combined indoor and outdoor spaces and scouts the environment, acting as an “extra teammate” for first responders.
Natural Language Processing (TALN) Group at the UPF has been working within the INGENIOUS project on the Multilingual Operations App (MOA) which aims to facilitate the communication between international First Responder teams (FRs) and the Command Center through the COP/C3 platform. Specifically, the MOA does speech-to-speech translation, enabling the FRs to send voice messages in their own language that will be transcribed, translated to English and received in the COP/C3 as text and/or voice messages.
Segments of operation: People search, assessment of damaged buildings and bridges, clearance, support of crisis management
Deployment period: 17-28/07/2021
Deployment location: Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Dernau, Erftstadt, Stolberg, Vicht, Zweifall
Deployment request: Police Rhineland-Palatinate, crisis unit and building authority Erftstadt and Stolberg
During an emergency, the lack of information (provided by IT systems) and therefore situational awareness is one factor that leads to human error and disorganised emergency response. However, unfamiliar locations and uncontrolled conditions are not the most suitable circumstances for deploying extensive IT solutions, especially with high mobility requirements as those of First Responders (FRs).
The Expert Reasoning and Data Exploitation component, developed by the INGENIOUS partners from CERTH, aims at modelling the information about resources, entities and relations related with the INGENIOUS application domain as ontology patterns for the purpose of enabling a system generating early alerts.
Smart Boots can augment a First Responder (FR) situational awareness, providing lifesaving warnings and alerts that no other wearable device can offer. The smart boot system by CyRIC is a wearable tool that boosts the INGENIOUS Next Generation Integrated Toolkit (NGIT) and enhances individual or team operational capacities. Smart Boot system is composed of hardware, i.e. the smart insole pair located inside the FR regular safety boots and of software, i.e. Boot Edge Software (BES) hosted on the FR Uniform.
UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have shown to be a valuable instrument to inspect indoor spaces, such as damaged buildings. The images collected by these platforms are useful to understand the environment, detect relevant details such as the presence of possible hazards and localize trapped people before First Responders (FR) enter inside. So far, this useful information needs to be extracted by human operators from long image and video sequences, requesting an additional effort for the rescue team on the field. In this regard, an automated procedure to automatically extract the useful information would make the use of UAV more effective, giving tangible support to FR’s prompt action.
