DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATED SENSING SYSTEM TO AID RESCUE OPERATIONS AFTER AN EARTHQUAKE

This work aims to develop an automated sensing system to aid rescue team and their operations after an earthquake. Earthquakes lead to great damage of property and loss of lives. Only, robust and intelligent planning systems can reduce the loss. The unpredictable scale of disaster is beyond the scope of human mission planning and hence results in extremely hopeless conditions and further not suitable for rescue operations. Disasters like earthquakes needs immediate attention and the victims must be pulled out of danger without delay. In addition, the structural conditions may be unfavorable, dangerous and unknown. Hence, there is a fundamental need to investigate such conditions without compromising victim's safety. Techniques need to be developed for the safer access to victims under these hostile conditions. So, now-adays the robotic systems for Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) have become a thrust area that needs a greater attention. In this paper, a movable robotic system is proposed to detect the human existence in unmanned geographical structures. The system constitutes monitoring sensors and equipment for studying the conditions of human body and transmit the data to server. These portable robots make localization tracking to communicate over wireless sensor networks. The sensing system on the USAR mobile robot will contain a camera unit, thermal and PIR based imaging, processor (probably a laptop for high-end processing), high frequency based detection (motion and existence) and a GPS module for latitude and longitude detection.