Semi-Autonomous Search and Rescue System
Eli Walz, Katherine R. Hammonds, Megan Rumbaugh, Richard T. O’Brien · 2023
A proposed semi-autonomous search and rescue system identifies and tracks a person using a piloted unmanned aerial vehicle with a downward-facing vision system. This vehicle communicates the person’s location to an autonomous unmanned ground vehicle to recover the target. An object detection neural network and image processing system can detect humans from an aerial perspective using RGB and thermal images. A Python simulation of the ground vehicle demonstrates that the heading and velocity controllers are robust to noise and disturbances.