Drone with Multiple Sensors for Night-time Search Missions of Disaster Victims

In recent years, unmanned autonomous vehicles have been playing a vital role in various fields due to technological development. LiDAR technology, in particular, has been widely and rapidly expanding its applications for automatic driving, transportation, delivery, mapping and so on. Drone is definitely one of the promising applications which can benefit from LiDAR technology. For Japan, as a country well-known for natural disasters, LiDAR can be a key technology for disaster to observe a damage situation. The objective of this study is to develop a drone system equipped with 3D-LiDAR sensor, thermal camera and a microphone array for search and rescue missions of disaster victims at the early stage of a large-scale natural disaster such as earthquake, tsunami, or landslide, as often encountered in Japan. The uniqueness of this study resides in that all the three sensing methods can work at night-time, which enables to search disaster victims for day and night at the early stage of the disaster where many victims are still alive. In this paper, two advanced sensors, 3D-LiDAR and thermal camera, are mounted on DJI Matrice 300 RTK while a microphone array is separately tested on a small-sized drone. The paper validates the possibility of observing the human body shape laid on ground while measuring the overall topography of the disaster hit area by means of 3D-LiDAR. At the same time, the thermal camera shows its advantages in detecting people who are waiting for rescue under the trees.