IoT-enabled autonomous system collaboration for disaster-area management

Abstract

Timely investigating post-disaster situations to locate survivors and secure hazardous sources is critical, but also very challenging and risky. Despite first responders putting their lives at risk in saving others, human-physical limits cause delays in response time, resulting in fatality and property damage. In this paper, we proposed and implemented a framework intended for creating collaboration between heterogeneous unmanned vehicles and first responders to make search and rescue operations safer and faster. The framework consists of unmanned aerial vehicles ( UAVs ) , unmanned ground vehicles ( UGVs ) , a cloud-based remote control station ( RCS ) . A light-weight message queuing telemetry transport ( MQTT ) based communication is adopted for facilitating collaboration between autonomous systems. To effectively work under unfavorable disaster conditions, antenna tracker is developed as a tool to extend network coverage to distant areas, and mobile charging points for the UAVs are also implemented. The proposed frameworkʼ s performance is evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay and analyzed using architectural analysis and design language ( AADL ) . Experimental measurements and simulation results show that the adopted communication protocol performs more efficiently than other conventional communication protocols, and the implemented UAV control mechanisms are functioning properly. Several scenarios are implemented to validate the overall effectiveness of the proposed framework and demonstrate possible use cases.