According to the World Meteorological Organization, the frequency of severe weather incidents, such as hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, flooding, has quintupled over the last five decades, causing more than 100 000 fatalities and 1.5 trillion euros of economic losses in Europe (EU) . The wildfires and floods experienced by EU countries in summer 2023 confirmed that these natural disasters are a significant challenge to address over the years to come. On the other hand, despite a decreasing trend, technological disasters, man-made hazardous events, caused more than 150 thousand of deaths over 2000-2021 period, one of the last most important events being the explosion in the port of Lebanon in 2020 . This additional pollution leads to greater vulnerability among populations and the degradation of ecosystems. Consequently, disaster management capabilities need to be enhanced in this fast-evolving context. Robotics can play a crucial role to improve first responders’ safety and effectiveness in their operations. Indeed, Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) and/or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can provide useful tools to map the environment in risky conditions, providing data related to the intervention site or people location without sending people on the field. This is an active field of research, as witnessed by several EU projects, such as ResponDrone , Intrepid . However, limitations are still holding back these cutting-edge innovations from becoming a disaster management standard. Regarding UGVs, disruptions can be caused either by the loss of lines of sight with the control station, either by navigation issues resulting from perception module failures, as camera images can be significantly degraded with fog or smoke – this one being particularly relevant for hazardous events – or by high complex environment such as urban areas. Moreover, high demanding data processing is required for effective data-driven tactical management in real operational scenarios, challenging communication infrastructures subjected to disturbances as well as computing times for evacuation planning or disaster evolution models. HURRICANE will unlock the potential of UGVs operation in hazardous environment, relying on enhanced vision capabilities, innovative resilient communication, relying on innovative UAV-UGV cooperation pathways, and smart integration over a holistic, resilient and real-time situational awareness infrastructure. Data-driven optimization models will provide recommendations through a user-friendly API to support first responders’ tactics. Three complementary pilots will be implemented to demonstrate the benefits brought by HURRICANE solutions. Last, but not least, EU-wide training modules will be implemented to raise awareness among first responders about these innovative technologies, integrating new operational procedures.
Organisations
- Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC)
- Scientific Departments (ITC-SCI)
- ITC-TECH (ITC-SCI-TECH)