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).
The INGENIOUS Journal Paper titled “Training a disaster victim detection network for UAV search and rescue using harmonious composite images” was published in the Special Issue Remote Sensing for Emergency Management: Algorithms, Methods and Applications on June 22, 2022.
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.
The MINs are one of the different autonomous aerial vehicles that are being developed within the INGENIOUS project. The main goal of the MINs, which are being developed by our partners in SINTEF, is to support the localization of FR moving in indoor dangerous and GNSS-denied environments.
A novel testing, training and experimentation programme of 27 Laboratory Integration and Testing sessions (LITs), 18 Small Scale Field Tests (SSTs) and 2 Full Scale Field Validation Exercises (FSXs) 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 M34 and M41 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.
