Survivor search with autonomous UGVs using multimodal overt attention
M. Zaheer Aziz, Bärbel Mertsching · 2010
Rescue robotics is gaining increasing attention as an application of human assistance machines. Robots (or unmanned ground vehicles) for searching victims in disaster sites require a high level of reliability and robustness. This paper proposes a mobile vision system able to search for victims using integration of video and thermal camera inputs. A time efficient scanning strategy is designed for the pan-tilt camera head with a biologically inspired robust search mechanism to improve the performance of the overall system. Results show success of the proposed methodology in enhancing robustness in autonomous survivor detection.