Unmanned aerial system for first responders

Abstract

In this paper a roadmap is described for future work using stereo thermal cameras to locate and avoid heat sources or hot-spots commonly encountered in disaster remediation tasks using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The proposed stereo forward looking infrared (FLIR) camera system will allow a UAV to locate bodies of heat, avoid such bodies to protect its sensitive mechanical and electronic components, and identify those heat sources globally in an objective frame in order to aid remote flight operators in the mapping of unknown and often hazardous environments. The locations of these identified bodies of heat can be combined with more traditional sensors used for obstacle detection such as LIDAR or a Time of Flight (ToF) camera to allow first responders to deploy UAV in many different types of emergency events. First responders can easily operate UAVs semi-autonomously to gather information, and act decisively without having to provide obstacle free paths for UAVs in advance. A 3D vector mesh (VM) avoidance algorithm will be used with sensor data from the stereo FLIR cameras, LIDAR, and the ToF camera to achieve both physical and thermal obstacle avoidance. The combination of these avoidance measures will facilitate the creation of a robust and semi-autonomous UAV platform that may provide critical support to first responders in typical disaster remediation tasks.