AIRED : Artificially intelligent Emergency response drone for SAR

Key Features

AIRED has modern functionalities as follows:

• High Payload capacity, versatile, and platform agnostic architecture
  • With the assistance of its six motors, the AIRED can raise up to 5 kg of weight.
• Autopilot
  • AIRED can compute the flying distance and loop across the designated area thanks to the flight controller and Jetson TX2.
• Efficient optimization
  • Swarm formation capability for faster ground coverage
• Quick visualization
  • The AIRED results are transmitted in real time on a monitor alongside GPS coordinates of human detection.

Motivation

• Kerala, a state in southern India, reported experiencing its worst flood in nearly a century on August 16, 2018. 140 individuals remain missing, and over 483 people died. Our project was helpful for search and rescue efforts.

Implementation

• Utilizing the HERIDAL dataset, we created a multimodal technique (FPN + Classification) for human identification.
• We were able to launch a hot drop using our drone's 5 kg of payload (Survival kit).
• The precision and recall of the experiment were 58.89% and 84.65%, respectively.

A Quick Summary of the Project.

This is the project that I am most proud of which we named AI response drone for Search and Rescue. I am from kerala, a southern state in India. In 2018, a flood stuck the state resulted in several deaths and 140 people went missing. It was very difficult for the search and rescue to go in person to the affected areas in search of stranded people from the flood. We were also part of support team by provided food and supplies to the affected areas. We were able to understand the difficulties in reaching to the affected area even after several days from the incident. These incidents motivated us to develop our project. The Hexacopter drone was provided with AI capabilities of dectecting humans and animals from an aerial view. The model was trained using Heridal dataset which contained images of human and animals stranded from an aerial view. We used Jetson TX2 an edge based computing device with the Pixhawk Flight Controller which enabled the feature of marking coordinates on map and the drone will hover over the enclosed coordinates and send the GPS coordinates along with live video feed when a human is detected. This enabled Search and rescue team to easily arrive at the area of need without wasting there time by searching for the needy people. Our drone had a high payload capacity of 5kg we utilized it for a hot drop mechanism where some immediate survival kit can be dropped to the located area from the drone so that people can survive till the Search and rescue team arrives. We presented our project in an international project presentation and made it to the finals and represented our college.