In recent years, geological and meteorological disasters occur frequently in China, causing severe casualty and loss of property. Accurate grasp of damage situation at the first time after the disaster can help rescue personnel make optimal rescue decision.

Bearing this in mind, researchers from the rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) group of Shenyang Institute of automation (SIA), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in cooperation with National Earthquake Emergency Rescue Center, conducted research on automatic disaster assessment system based on unmanned UAVs platform of ultra-low altitude.

Rescue team came up with the need to identify real-time collapsed buildings. Based on actual aerial image of disaster area, Hua Chunsheng, researcher from SIA proposed a plan under which irregular collapsed buildings are used as objects, and shapes of objects can be described by using statistical histogram. Combined with trajectory and other characteristics, a real-time detection system of the online collapsed buildings can be constituted via online clustering algorithm and spatio-temporal tracking algorithm of objects, achieving real-time detection and analysis of the collapsed buildings of the disaster area based on unmanned UAVs platform of low altitude.

There were good experimental results obtained in the experiments of aerial video of disaster area in Lushan earthquake in Sichuan in 2013. According to known public records, it was the first disaster assessment system at home that could achieve real-time detection of the collapsed buildings based on unmanned UAVs platform of low altitude, winning high praise from the China International Search & Rescue Team.

The results will be published in the SCI Journal, Science China, Information & System and Journal of Field Robotics (Chunsheng Hua, Juntong Qi, Shang Hong, Weijian Hua, Jianda Han, “Detection of collapsed buildings with the aerial images captured from UAV”, Science China Information & System，2015(Have been recorded)； JJuntong Qi, Dalei Song, Hong Shang, Nianfa Wang, Chunsheng Hua, Chong Wu, Xin Qi and Jianda Han, ”Search and Rescue Rotary-Wing UAV and Its Application to the LuShan Ms 7.0 Earthquake”, Journal of Field Robotics, 2015(Have been recorded)). This work also won the support from related projects of support projects of Ministry of Science and Technology and the State Key Laboratory of Robotics.

Source: Robotics Laboratory