Supporting Search and Rescue Operations with UAVs

Search and rescue operations can greatly benefit from the use of autonomous UAVs to survey the environment and collect evidence about the position of a missing person. To minimize the time to find the victim, some fundamental parameters need to be accounted for in the design of the search algorithms: 1) quality of sensory data collected by the UAVs, 2) UAVs energy limitations, 3) environmental hazards (e.g. winds, trees), 4) level of information exchange/coordination between UAVs. In this paper, we discuss how these parameters can affect the search task and present some of the research avenues we have been exploring. We then study the performance of different search algorithms when the time to find the victim is the optimization criterion.