Subproject – Intelligent Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

The number of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) applications for supporting common firefighters and industrial firefighters is growing in recent years. In particular exploration, surveillance and monitoring of dangerous places and critical infrastructure is evaluated. Up to this point, all gathered information, for instance, video footage, is analysed manually by trained professionals without any additional support. Such analysis creates an enormous psychological and emotional load, especially in critical and hectic situations. In order to improve the application and reduce the load of manual analysis, the project EffFeu aims for a holistic integration of UAS in the daily work of industrial firefighters.

The subproject of the DAI-Lab (TU-Berlin) focuses especially on automated situation detection, autonomous navigation in the transition from absolute GPS localisation to relative localisation and mapping approaches (e.g. simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM)) and the intelligent, application- and mission-oriented control of aerial systems. Portability, openness and extendibility of the solution as well as connectivity, acceptance and application of common standards are consequently considered during the development of the project.

Research focus:

• Object and situation recognition
• Goal-oriented control (decision-making and planning) of robots
• Localisation and navigation in the transition of indoor and outdoor environment

Publications:

• Christopher-Eyk Hrabia , Patrick Marvin Lehmann, Sahin Albayrak. Increasing Self-Adaptation in a Hybrid Decision-Making and Planning System with Reinforcement Learning. In: 2019 IEEE 43rd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC); 2019
• Christopher-Eyk Hrabia, Axel Heßler, Yuan Xu, Jacob Seibert, Jan Brehmer, and Sahin Albayrak. EffFeu Project: Towards Mission-Guided Application of Drones in Safety and Security Environments. In: MDPI Sensors, Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems and Applications; 2019
• Christopher-Eyk Hrabia, Axel Heßler, Yuan Xu, Jan Brehmer, Sahin Albayrak. EffFeu Project: Efficient Operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Industrial Fire Fighters. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications; 2018
• Christopher-Eyk Hrabia, Tanja Kaiser, Sahin Albayrak: Combining Self-Organisation with Decision-Making and Planning. Multi-Agent Systems and Agreement Technologies: 15th European Conference, EUMAS 2017, Evry, France, December 14-15, 2017
• Christopher-Eyk Hrabia, Stephan Wypler, Sahin Albayrak: Towards Goal-driven Behaviour Control of Multi-Robot Systems. 2017 IEEE 3nd International Conference on Control, Automation and Robotics (ICCAR); 2017 

BMBF project flyer: http://www.sifo.de/files/Projektumriss_EffFeu.pdf