Wireless technologies to assist search and localization of victims of wide-scale natural disasters by unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

When natural disasters are occurred, a lot of injured victims should be found and have medical treatment as soon as possible. However, looking for the victims is not easy due to destroyed infrastructures. In order to solve the problems, authors have been proposed several solutions by using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and dependable wireless communication technology. As a dependable wireless communication, ultra-wide band (UWB) radio which is known as a physical layer (PHY) of wireless body area network (WBAN) is used in this research. UWB radio can realize an accurate localization system which can be used indoor based on high resolution time difference detection of arrival time. Our proposal consists of several steps. At first, geo-location of multiple UAVs are estimated by global navigation satellite system (GNSS) such as global positioning system (GPS). Secondly, one of the multiple drones moves towards to destination in order to expand position estimation coverage area. When a victim who has UWB device is found, anchor nodes on multiple UAVs estimate the position of the victim. In addition, UWB sensor node which is owned by the victim can get vital-sign of the victim and transmit that with position information to rescue team via UAVs. This paper provides the latest results of theoretical analysis and experiments that performed by using actual UAVs and UWB localization system.