Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘search and rescue’

One of the ten largest earthquakes ever recorded in the world

Google’s Person Finder, also used in the recent New Zealand earthquake, is only as effective as the numbers of people using it — but it’s catching on quickly, with about 6,900 records as of 10:30 a.m. EST. Users can enter a name in English or Japanese and search for missing persons, or post updates about people who you know are safe. It also aggregates other disaster bulletin boards erected by Japanese companies.

Similarly, a local developer in Tokyo put up an Ushahidi crisis platform, which is collecting information about the locations of trapped people and unsafe buildings. People can find out where to find help or a pop-up hospital, according to GOOD. The platform was used to help relief workers in Haiti.

Though Japan is by far the hardest hit, 20 countries including the U.S., Canada, Russia, the Philippines and several Pacific island nations are under tsunami warnings. Hawaii’s Pacific Disaster Center is posting updated tsunami warnings and a map showing the dangers facing each of the state’s islands.

The Hawaii chapter of the Red Cross is using Twitter to post tsunami warnings and potential evacuation efforts.

And a United Nations satellite-monitoring group might also be activated, reports Fast Company.

The earthquake is among the top 10 largest ever recorded, according to U.S. Geological Survey seismologists. The devastation is still unfolding, with fires raging, widespread blackouts and a devastating tsunami. Workers at a nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture are having trouble cooling off the reactor, and the area is being evacuated; hundreds of people are confirmed dead in the wake of the tsunami; waves of mud inundated farmland; and transportation has ground to a halt.

Meanwhile, disaster-relief agencies are starting to mobilize and accept donations. The Defense Department is readying American forces in the Pacific to help, AP reported.

Here’s how it’s going to go down.

After the mine collapse, rescuers on the surface were able to get fresh water, food, and other supplies to the trapped men via tiny boreholes, but to drill a shaft big enough for the men to escape was another story altogether. The rescue shaft is only about the size of a bicycle tire, stretching all the way from the surface to the 500-square-foot chamber where the men have been living since August. Moving 33 men through a narrow, somewhat unstable shaft is going to take some technological trickery.

The biggest trick by far is the custom-built rescue capsule, designed in part by NASA engineers who have been helping the Chilean Navy devise a means to ferry the men to the surface. At just 21.5 inches in diameter, “Phoenix” – as the capsule is known – weighs nearly 1,000 pounds and stands about 14 feet tall. The men packed tighlty inside will be hooked to an oxygen supply good for 90 minutes (the trip to the surface will hopefully take no more than half an hour for each miner). The capsule is fitted with exterior wheels that will help it slide down the borehole as it is lowered by a massive crane.

As of about around noon Monday, engineers had finished reinforcing what they thought to be weak parts of the shaft and conducted a successful unmanned test of the Phoenix capsule, taking it down 2,000 feet into the ground (just 46 feet shy of where the miners are awaiting rescue). The next step is a manned test of the rig. After enough dry runs have convinced rescue officials that the rescue vehicle is safe the rescue will begin, an event that has been termed “D-Day.”

Barring any setbacks, D-Day could begin late Tuesday night, with the first miner surfacing in the early hours of Wednesday morning. First, a Chilean Special Forces medic will descend to assess the state of the miners. Miners in decent condition will be sent up first, followed by the weakest and least healthy of the group. The strongest and most healthy miners will be the last out of the mine. Each miner will be in constant communication with rescuers while in the capsule, and each will wear special glasses to shield his sensitive eyes – now more than two months without natural daylight – from the sun. The operation will likely go on until Thursday morning.

And what happens if the capsule gets stuck? We don’t want to jinx the operation by even mentioning the possibility, but the capsule is equipped with an escape hatch in the bottom that would allow a miner to descend back down into the shelter. Here’s hoping no one has to use it, as there’s a heck of a welcoming planned for them up here on the surface.

[SkyNews, Globe and Mail]

Small drones are useful in disaster situations because they can fly over rough terrain and communicate easily, but if they’re going to catch on, they must be simple to design and use, according to the EPFL Intelligent Systems Laboratory.

Students built 1-pound plastic foam microdrones with 31-inch wingspans and outfitted them with electric motors, a Linux-based processor, GPS and a WiFi dongle. Then they had to design swarm algorithms.

First, the researchers used artificial evolution models to uncover unique control mechanisms, and reverse-engineered their findings. Then they turned to one of evolution’s best-studied social systems: Ants.

As the project’s Web site explains, the creatures deploy to search for and maintain pheromone paths that lead them to food. This behavior can be an analogue for deploying communication networks that would help rescuers, the researchers say.

Before being launched into the air Frisbee-style, the robots perform a self-check and calibrate themselves. They are monitored and controlled through a swarm interface running on a laptop.

To test their new system, students took 10 drones into a field overlooking Mount Blanc and watched them swarm. Check it out below.

[via Makezine]

Mark Micire, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, proposes using Surface, Microsoft's interactive tabletop, to unite various types of data, robots and other smart technologies around a common goal. It seems so obvious and so simple, you have to wonder why this type of technology is not already widespread.

In defending his graduate thesis earlier this week, Micire showed off a demo of his swarm-control interface, which you can watch below.

You can tap, touch and drag little icons to command individual robots or robot swarms. You can leave a trail of crumbs for them to follow, and you can draw paths for them in a way that looks quite like Flight Control, one of our favorite iPod/iPad games. To test his system, Micire steered a four-wheeled vehicle through a plywood maze.

The system can integrate a variety of data sets, like city maps, building blueprints and more. You can pan and zoom in on any map point, and you can even integrate video feeds from individual robots so you can see things from their perspective.

As Micire describes it, current disaster-response methods can’t automatically compile and combine information to search for patterns. A smart system would integrate data from all kinds of sources, including commanders, individuals and robots in the field, computer-generated risk models, and more.

Emergency responders might not have the time or opportunity to get in-depth training on new technologies, so a simple touchscreen control system like this would be more useful. At the very least, it seems like a much more intuitive way to control future robot armies.

[UMass Lowell Robotics Lab via BotJunkie]

When hikers go missing in the mountains, search-and-rescue (SAR) teams mobilize in a complicated and very expensive operation to find them. The National Park Service alone spends about $4 million a year rescuing the lost, and that’s saying nothing of individual city and county expenses. What’s more, search teams can be imperiled by bad weather.

The drone project simplifies all this by equipping a miniature aircraft, just a 4-foot wingspan, with a video camera. A SAR operator directs the plane by clicking on a computerized map. The plane can also work autonomously, by analyzing the terrain and using probabilistic models to determine a lost person’s likely route.

Experienced SAR team leaders helped develop the autonomous search algorithms, the authors note. Lost hikers may seem to wander randomly, but they usually seek lower, flatter ground. The plane analyzes terrain maps to predict where a hiker might end up.

In trials, operators using the craft have taken between 35 and 150 minutes to find a dummy dumped in the wilderness, according to a report on the research in New Scientist.

The research team, led by Lanny Lin, Michael Roscheck, Michael A. Goodrich, and Bryan S. Morse of BYU’s computer science department, led a trial last fall in which they spent 30 minutes training a SAR team leader on how to use the drone. Afterward, it took him 35 minutes to locate a dummy they dropped in the Utah wilderness, according to the team’s paper (PDF).

So far, a human operator is needed to spot the missing person, because the UAV’s visual-detection algorithms aren’t advanced enough yet to find a person in the photos.

A paper on the team’s work was presented this week at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Atlanta.

[New Scientist]

Underwater swimmers and crawlers could speed up rescue efforts for incidents such as the recent sinking of a South Korean Navy frigate

The government announced today that it would spend about $18 million (20 billion won) over the next five years to create its creepy-crawly robot. That represents a doubling of the project's budget following the sinking of the South Korean Navy frigate Cheonan late last month, which killed dozens of sailors.

Such six-legged devices would walk at speeds of 98 feet per second and swim at up to 59 feet per second. The design specs call for it to patrol the seabed at depths of about 3.7 miles.

A shallow-sea version would come online by 2012, with a deep-sea prototype slated for 2015. The robots would also carry sonar equipment, according to The Korea Herald.

The South Korean ministry believes that having such a drone might have sped up search and rescue efforts for the Cheonan sinking incident, which took place in the West Sea with strong tidal currents and poor visibility.

Other nations have already deployed small swarms of marine robots for scientific research, and a U.S. robotic glider completed the first underwater robot crossing of the Atlantic late last year. A Canadian robot also became the first Internet-enabled undersea observatory around the same time.

[via Korea Times and The Korea Herald]