DroneAlert: Autonomous drones for emergency response

Abstract

Often, public safety services have to respond to emergency alerts of which little or nothing is known besides the time and location, as is the case of Galileo’s SAR alerts. In such cases the emergency responders have to wait until arriving to the alert location before analysing the situation and defining an action plan, thus using precious time. Autonomous drones can be sent to the location of the alert to quickly provide real-time imagery of the situation to allow emergency responders to analyse and prepare for the situation before responding or during departure to the alert’s origin. Using a GNSS chip to know its position, and based on a geographical model on the area, it is possible to create and load a flight path for the drone to fly autonomously and perform a set of predefined actions, such as broadcasting live video stream, take pictures, drop a survival kit or establish bidirectional communications with the person that threw the alert. This chapter describes the drone-based public safety service in detail and how localisation information is used to support it.