Turning the tide
Accidents can happen during leisure or work activities at sea, and when they do, the result is almost certain death.
A person can live up to 30 minutes in waters with temperatures under 10 degrees Celsius. This time can be extended to two hours if they have an inflatable device. On average, 55% of people that fall overboard ships lose their lives.
The OSAR project aims to save lives by automating and enhancing search and rescue missions at sea. The team led by Associate Professor Evangelos Boukas will develop a fully autonomous drone for search and rescue operations in maritime environments.
The autonomous drone will be able to be deployed from a vessel, search for people in water, provide an inflatable device to them with a satellite marker, and return to the vessel, while withstanding adverse weather conditions.
Life-saving technology
The team will focus on developing multi-modal detection techniques using RGB, thermal and infrared cameras, so that they can identify people in water under different visibility conditions. Furthermore, they will dive into dynamic path planning methods that utilize all available information to optimize the search procedure. Lastly, behavior trees will be developed, giving the drone the ability to complete the operation fully autonomously.
All the developed methods will be integrated within the drone platform to be tested in real world scenarios. The drone will be developed on land at first, and eventually tested at sea. The team aims to create new maritime datasets aimed at detection of people and objects at sea, but also for the development of navigation techniques in maritime environments.
Expectations
By the end of the project, the team expects to have a fully autonomous drone platform that can successfully search for people at sea and give them a satellite-enabled inflatable device to help them until rescuers arrive at their now known location. Also, they will have created datasets aimed for general operations at sea with multispectral data.
The OSAR project will make maritime activities safer and will promote the whole industry. The time the rescue operation takes and the time that the vessel has to halt will be reduced, reducing in turn the extra emissions of the vessels and saving money in the process.
The project is funded by Den Danske Maritime Fond and Orients Fond.
