Overview
Promising unmanned aerial vehicle technology for emergency response
Equipped with sensors and cameras to provide real-time information, drones or unmanned aircraft can provide efficient and effective support during emergency situations. In this context, the EU-funded COVER project will develop a cooperative, connected and intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system for emergency response applications (ERAs). It will create a context-aware and service-oriented UAV-to-everything network, as well as robust cooperative UAV sensing and computing schemes and intelligent cooperative UAV control strategies. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies, the project seeks to enhance the potential of participating researchers, promote research innovation, and contribute to European leadership in UAVs. The technologies and applications will have broad applications in various ERAs, as well as in public safety and agriculture.
The climate change is now one of the biggest threats faced by our natural world and leads to many extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires and heatwaves. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are the promising technologies for the emergency response applications (ERAs) to provide more efficient and faster services to save lives and reduce economic loss. This project aims to develop an innovative cooperative, connected and intelligent UAVs (CIUs) for ERAs, where sensing and computing resources, and flying information from individual UAV could be shared and exploited through effective communications and control of the CIUs. Specifically, context-aware and service-oriented UAV-to-everything (U2X) networks; robust cooperative UAV sensing and computing (CSC) schemes and intelligent cooperative UAV control strategies for ERAs will be investigated. An international inter-sector and inter-disciplinary consortium consisting of world leading academic institutions and prominent industrial partners is created to collaborate on developing novel CIU technologies in ERAs. Cutting-edge communications networks, edge computing, cooperative sensing, intelligent control, and machine learning related technologies will be investigated to tackle the associated challenges. With competent and complementary expertise of the partners and their extensive international research collaboration experience, this project will promote research innovation, foster knowledge sharing, enhance the potentials of participating researchers, and contribute to the European leadership in the UAVs, cooperative sensing and computing, multi-agent control, information and communications technology (ICT), and emergency response sectors. The developed CIU technologies and applications are not only applicable in various ERAs, like flooding, wildfires, and earthquake; but can also be readily extended to other applications, such as smart cities, public safety, agriculture, and the wider scientific community.