Collapsed buildings, earth cracks, confusing and above all unstable piles of rubble are the terrain on which search teams have to look for missing and potentially buried persons. Rather primitive tools, human intuition and trained search dogs are used. Due to the circumstances, the searches are complicated and take a long time due to potential aftershocks, unstable ground and lack of knowledge about what is underneath. How practical it would be to be able to help the trapped people faster, more efficiently and without endangering oneself.
This is exactly the approach taken by the CURSOR project of a European research initiative, which is about to become operational. The idea? A large mothership drone coordinates from its permanent position above the search area a multitude of airborne scan drones and ground-based search robots, which act as a swarm. The behavior of the individual actuators is coordinated, the virtual environment created by scanner drones allows precise scanning of every angle, and thanks to tracking sensors, high-performance microphones and ground penetrating radar, human bodies are also detected below the surface.
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The small single-axis robots, called SMURF, can also check narrow crevices and areas that are unsafe for search forces to enter, report finds to the swarm, and allow rescuers to precisely access and rescue themselves.
Several intensive field tests have taken place in the last months and the final presentation of the CURSORproject took place just this week. We are therefore optimistic that in the future there will be more robots doing their part for the benefit of humans in the event of a disaster.