Selected Functionalities for Autonomous Intelligent Systems in Public Safety Scenarios

Abstract: The public safety and security application domain is an important research area that provides great benefits to society. Within this application domain, governmental and non‐governmental agencies, such as blue light organizations (e.g., police or firefighters), are often tasked with essential life‐saving activities when responding to fallouts of natural or man‐made disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes. Recent technological advances in artificial intelligence and robotics offer novel tools that first responder teams can use to shorten response times and improve the effectiveness of rescue efforts. Modern first responder teams are increasingly being supported by autonomous intelligent systems such as ground robots or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, even though many commercial systems are available and used in real deployments, many important research questions still need to be answered. These relate to both autonomous intelligent system design and development in addition to how such systems can be used in the context of public safety applications. This thesis presents a collection of functionalities for autonomous intelligent systems in public safety scenarios. Contributions in this thesis are divided into two parts. In Part 1, we focus on the design of navigation frameworks for UAVs for solving the problem of autonomous navigation in dynamic or changing environments. In particular, we present several novel ideas for integrating motion planning, control, and perception functionalities within robotic architectures to solve navigation tasks efficiently. In Part 2, we concentrate on an important service that autonomous intelligent systems can offer to first responder teams. Specifically, we focus on base functionalities required for UAV‐based rapid ad hoc communication infrastructure deployment in the initial phases of rescue operations. The main idea is to use heterogeneous teams of UAVs to deploy communication nodes that include routers and are used to establish ad hoc Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). We consider fundamental problems related to WMN network design, such as calculating node placements, and propose efficient novel algorithms to solve these problems. Considerable effort has been put into applying the developed techniques in real systems and scenarios. Thus, the approaches presented in this thesis have been validated through extensive simulations and real‐world experimentation with various UAV systems. Several contributions presented in the thesis are generic and can be adapted to other autonomous intelligent system types and application domains other than public safety and security.