Vision-Based Autonomous UAV Navigation and Landing for Urban Search and Rescue

Understand

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions.

• However, these UAVs have to be able to autonomously navigate in disaster struck environments and land on debris piles in order to accurately locate the survivors.
• This problem is extremely challenging as pre-existing maps cannot be leveraged for navigation due to structural changes that may have occurred.
• Furthermore, existing landing site detection algorithms are not suitable to identify safe landing regions on debris piles.