Safe map generation after a disaster, assisted by an unmanned aerial vehicle tracking system

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method to build safe maps through disaster‐stricken zones by taking advantage of different scenarios of tracking pedestrians and area scanning. Tracking is usually achieved by following the refugees' mobile devices. However, sometimes refugees do not hold mobiles to track them. To overcome this problem, we exploit the tracking systems of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which enable both image processing and mobile tracking depending on the scenario. UAV technology is a low‐cost, flexible solution in missions that are difficult to execute by humans and other systems. After a disaster event, a safe map can be constructed from aerial imagery data of the moving pedestrians. Aerial data are also useful for evaluating damage in the stricken areas. The present study integrates UAVs into the Internet of Things, generating a pseudo scenario for the map generation. Experiments confirmed the usefulness of low‐cost UAVs in tracking and scanning with and without smartphone tracking data. © 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.