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 – will navigate by itself in combined indoor and outdoor spaces and scout the environment, acting as a sort of “extra teammate” for first responders.
A novel testing, training and experimentation programme of 24 laboratory testing sessions, 24 field tests and 2 large scale field validation activities will be realised within the lifecycle of the project. Technical partners and end users will follow closely the laboratory testing activities, realise field tests of the initial versions of functional prototypes towards benchmarking and ultimately operate the Toolkit as a whole in two large field validation activities to be held in M26 and M35 of the project.
The design and prototyping of several smart flying and ground devices have been performed in the first year of Ingenious. One of the INGENIOUS main aims is to provide first responders with new instruments to enable improved scene perception, indoor/outdoor mapping, accurate self-localization in indoor environments, as well as data communication with other devices. For this purpose INGENIOUS partners from SINTEF, FOI and DLR are developing three drones (MIN, MAX and MACS) and a self-localization tool (IPS). All these devices are connected with the field communication system.
