IP-Phenix

Problem Statement

Development of a mission control panel prototype for search and rescue drones in participation with the fire department Kamp-Lintfort and research project “Phenix” at Hochschule-Rhein-Waal (HSRW)

Many well-funded Fire Departments now employ search and rescue drones as first responders when dealing with an emergency situation, before sending in their human personnel. HSRW in partnership with the Kamp-Lintfort Fire Department came up with the Phenix Project which aims to create a fully functional search and rescue drone for assessing fire situations. The high point of this project is the development of the drone using cheap and easily purchased parts.

Our team is tasked with developing the communication system of the Phenix Drone.

Related Work

Drones used for firefighting operations and are equipped with add-ons, such as cameras to identify fire sources, hot spots, detect humans and animals, extinguishing agents etc.

The greatest advantage of these drones is that they can carry and guide a fire hose to heights that surpass the 30 meters ladder trucks and constantly tethered to a power supply, which ensures endless flight time. The Phenix drone is focused on fire detection and mission awareness capabilities.

Schaft, P. v. (2018). Firefighting Drones Aim to Fly Higher, Help Save Lives. Retrieved 1 9, 2019, from www.roboticsbusinessreview.com: Click here to visit the page

Implementation

The project is divided into two sub-sections: backend and frontend

Backend section consists of USB drone-pilot and Companion Computer. USB drone pilot receives information from the sensors on drone and this information is transmitted to MavProxy inside the Companion Computer. USB Master inside the MavProxy receives the information and broadcasts it to the Android application through its TCP port.

In the Frontend part of the app the data get fetched by a Worker-Thread and passed over to the associated views in the GUI. The user gets a notification if the values reach a critical point. For example, if the battery gets low the user can land the drone as soon as possible. This is to avoid problems with the drone. Each of these values can be toggled on or off in the Flight-Overlay

The main screen is a First-Person-View from a connected camera. This is made possible by a modified USB-Video-Class (UVC)-Library made in native C++. The camera gets automatically recognized and activated once plugged in.

Evaluation and discussion

We set out to develop the communication of the Phenix drone with the following functionalities in mind:

Drone FPV camera sends a realtime video stream to an accompanying Android app
Sensor data from the drone’s onboard computer is routed through a laptop computer used for drone control and mission planning. For onward transmission to the Android app as a video overlay
The concept of implementing 3D mapping to identify the victims and current fire areas. This can be achieved by integrating the RGB and infrared channels to construct thick 3D environmental patterns.

On project completion, all this was achieved including a sound alert system notifying the drone operator when certain sensor values have exceeded a preset operation range (flight time, altitude, temperature and battery level).

Outlook

Making the application platform independent.

3D mapping of victims and area under fire.

Drones save lives! Can be used as a First Aid help.

Enhancement of the quality of video streaming.

Project in action

Imaginery scenario of an incident

Project Management and Supervisors

Project Management

Prof. Dr. Frank Zimmer

Project Supervisors

Hoi Ying Lam

Andreas Markwart

Thi-Yen-Thu Nguyen

Jenny Pluschkat

Development team

Front-end	Back-end	Poster and Design	Documentation	Project leader
Dominik Tenelsen (Leader) Media and Communication Computer Science dominik.tenelsen@hsrw.org	Amir Abdullah Md Faruk (Leader) Information Engineering and Computer Science Amir-Abdullah-Md.Faruk@hsrw.org	Ibrahim Khalil Digital Media ibrahim.khalil@hsrw.org	Yoana Kutsova Communication & Information Engineering iollubolly@gmail.com	Etinosa-Peter Odia Communication & Information Engineering Etinosa-Peter.Odia@hsrw.org
Ivan-Stoyanov Tsekov Communication & Information Engineering Ivan-Stoyanov.Tsekov@hsrw.org	Sachin Kumar Information Engineering and Computer Science Sachin.Kumar@hsrw.org		Bahar Sohaleh Information Engineering and Computer Science Bahar.sohaleh@hsrw.org
Sohan Ahmed Communication & Information Engineering Sohan.Ahmed@hsrw.org	Mahesh Kumar Information Engineering and Computer Science mahesh.kumar@hsrw.org
	Nitin Bhati Information Engineering and Computer Science nitin.bhati@hsrw.org