Supporting Search and Rescue Operations with UAVs

TLDR

Search and rescue operations can benefit from autonomous UAVs that survey environments and locate missing persons, but effective deployment must consider sensory quality, energy limits, environmental hazards, and inter‑UAV coordination. The paper examines how these parameters influence search tasks and outlines research directions pursued. The authors evaluate various search algorithms by optimizing the time to locate a victim.

Abstract

Search and rescue operations can greatly benefit from the use of autonomous UAVs to survey the environment and collect evidence about the position of a missing person. To minimize the time to find the victim, some fundamental parameters need to be accounted for in the design of the search algorithms: 1) quality of sensory data collected by the UAVs, 2) UAVs energy limitations, 3) environmental hazards (e.g. winds, trees), 4) level of information exchange/coordination between UAVs. In this paper, we discuss how these parameters can affect the search task and present some of the research avenues we have been exploring. We then study the performance of different search algorithms when the time to find the victim is the optimization criterion.