Abstract
Abstract. This paper will introduce and describe the goals, concept and overall approach of the European 7th Framework Programme's project named CLOSE-SEARCH, which stands for 'Accurate and safe EGNOS-SoL Navigation for UAV-based low-cost SAR operations'. The goal of CLOSE-SEARCH is to integrate in a helicopter-type unmanned aerial vehicle, a thermal imaging sensor and a multi-sensor navigation system (based on the use of a Barometric Altimeter (BA), a Magnetometer (MAGN), a Redundant Inertial Navigation System (RINS) and an EGNOS-enabled GNSS receiver) with an Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (AIM) capability, to support the search component of Search-And-Rescue operations in remote, difficult-to-access areas and/or in time critical situations. The proposed integration will result in a hardware and software prototype that will demonstrate an end-to-end functionality, that is to fly in patterns over a region of interest (possibly inaccessible) during day or night and also under adverse weather conditions and locate there disaster survivors or lost people through the detection of the body heat. This paper will identify the technical challenges of the proposed approach, from navigating with a BA/MAGN/RINS/GNSS-EGNOSbased integrated system to the interpretation of thermal images for person identification. Moreover, the AIM approach will be described together with the proposed integrity requirements. Finally, this paper will show some results obtained in the project during the first test campaign performed on November 2010. On that day, a prototype was flown in three different missions to assess its high-level performance and to observe some fundamental mission parameters as the optimal flying height and flying speed to enable body recognition. The second test campaign is scheduled for the end of 2011.
Highlights
1.1 Unmanned Aircrafts in Search and Rescue missionsThe use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Search-AndRescue (SAR) operations is not new and does often benefit from the UAV developments in other fields and not precisely for SAR operations
Radio frequency technology belongs to the so-called Line-Of-Sight (LOS) technologies, and that means that eventual physical obstacles between the emitter and the receiver may degrade the Signal-toNoise Ratio (SNR) and cause communication quality downgrade or even loss
Integrity has been materialized in three concepts: the Alarm Limit (AL) is the error tolerance not to be exceeded without issuing an alert to the user; the Time-To-Alarm (TTA) is the maximum permitted duration between the onset of a failure and an alert being issued at the user’s side; and the Integrity Risk (IR), which is the probability of a miss-detected outof-tolerance signal not warned within the TTA
Summary
The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Search-AndRescue (SAR) operations is not new and does often benefit from the UAV developments in other fields and not precisely for SAR operations. Thinking on the general SAR context, when a small plane crashes in a remote area, or a fishing boat is lost at sea, or a hurricane devastates a region, or a person gets lost while he/she was hiking, SAR teams must scramble every available resource to scan vast areas for victims’ evidence or wreckage For this purpose, UAVs equipped with thermal or other sensors can be programmed to fly predefined search patterns at low altitudes —30 m to 150 m—, transmitting real-time imagery back to a ground station via a data link. This information is provided due to the system capacity of geo-referencing targets recognized by means of its remote-sensing component, together with and accurate and safe navigation —the description of components put in place to achieve such an objective is the aim of this paper, focusing on the ultra-safe navigation concept
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