Autonomous drones for assisting rescue services within the context of natural disasters

Information plays a key role to correctly handle consequences resulting from natural disasters. Discharging rescue teams from gathering that information, and automatically guiding rescue teams to most urgent sub-situations is an open issue in which mini-drones can be useful. Yet, the control of such vehicles is not straight forward to users and can be time consuming. Thus, our contribution is to bring autonomy to drones: to fly autonomously, e.g., scanning and covering a given area, and to realize some tasks (e.g., identifying groups of disabled persons). Last but not least, autonomous drones shall be able to perform both outdoor and indoor missions.