Tullio Joseph Tanzi

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.

UAVs for humanitarian missions: Autonomy and reliability

Information plays a key role in natural disaster crisis management and relief. A new generation of lightweight UAVs may help improve the situational awareness and assessment. They may first of all relieve rescue teams from time-consuming data collection tasks. At the same time, those UAVs may assist research operations through a more insightful and automated guidance thanks to advanced sensing capabilities. In order to achieve this vision, two challenges must be addressed though. The first one is to achieve a sufficient autonomy for such vehicles, both in terms of navigation and of interpretation of the data sensed. The second one relates to the reliability of the UAV with respect to accidental (safety) or malicious (security) risks. This paper first discusses the potential of UAV assistance in several humanitarian scenarios, as well as potential problems in such situations. The question of autonomy is then addressed. Finally, a secure embedded UAV architecture that relies on cryptographic protocols and on specific hardware capabilities is sketched.

Autonomous drones for disasters management: Safety and security verifications

Information plays a key role in natural disaster crisis management and relief. We discussed in previous contributions how lightweight Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or (micro-)drones can effectively assist rescuers in order to improve the situational awareness and assessment (Aprvrille et. al, 2014) and (Tanzi et al., 2014). The paper discusses how SysML-Sec/TTool can be efficiently used for formally verifying the safety and security of an autonomous drone mission and flight. More specifically, we consider the architecture of the system that we have used in the scope of the drone4u project. A Parrot platform is used to capture videos of its surroundings. Those videos are transmitted by the UAV to a remote computer, which autonomously controls the drone according to its mission. We have modeled the UAV embedded system (properly speaking the drone capturing the videos, connecting to a WIFI network, and applying remote orders), as well as the communication itself, and the processing performed by the remote control computer.

Public Safety Network: an Overview

Abstract A public safety network (PSN) is a communication network used by emergency services, such as police, fire brigades and medical emergency services, to prevent or respond to incidents that endanger people and/or property. Over the last few years, in order to enhance their efficiency, public safety organizations and first responders have increasingly turned to use personal devices and networked applications. Consequently, wireless systems, hand-held computers and mobile video cameras are increasingly present in PSNs. These devices are an efficient way to increase services’ efficiency, visibility and ability to instantly collaborate with central command, co-workers and other agencies.

Multi-level Latency Evaluation with an MDE Approach.

Designing embedded systems includes two main phases: (i) HW/SW Partitioning performed from high-level functional and architecture models, and (ii) Software Design performed with significantly more detailed models. Partitioning decisions are made according to performance assumptions that should be validated on the more refined software models. In this paper, we focus on one such metric: latencies between operations. We show how they can be modeled at different abstraction levels (partitioning, SW design) and how they can help determine accuracy of the computational complexity estimates made during HW/SW Partitioning.

Formal Methods for Safe Design of Autonomous Systems Dedicated to Risk Management

A new generation of Autonomous systems (UAVs, ROVERs, etc.) is coming that will help improve the situational awareness and assessment, especially in difficult conditions like disasters. Rescuers should be relieved from time-consuming data collection tasks as much as possible and at the same time, Autonomous systems should assist data collection through a more insightful and automated guidance thanks to advanced sensing capabilities. In order to achieve this vision, two challenges must be addressed though. The first one is to achieve a sufficient autonomy. The second one relates to the reliability with respect to accidental (safety) or even malicious (security) risks. This however requires the design of new embedded architectures to be more autonomous, while mitigating the harm they may potentially cause. Increased complexity and flexibility requires resorting to modelling, simulation and formal verification techniques in order to validate such critical aspects.

‘Feasibility-assessment of a drone-borne ground penetrating radar sensor for humanitarian applications in the context of disaster management’

In this paper we shall address the scientific issues that will determine the functional capability of a drone-borne ground penetrating radar sensor for humanitarian applications, particularly in the context of disaster management.

About radio science contribution to disaster management

When a natural disaster occurs in a populated zone, a fast and effective organization of the disaster management is necessary to assist the affected population, reduce the number of victims and limit the economic impact. Radio science plays an important role in the first two weeks after a disaster strikes (the response phase). The paper deals with: (1) general aspects of disaster management, (2) radio communication and observation services in a nominal situation and during the response phase of a disaster at the time of space weather events, (3) Emergency management.

Disaster risk reduction — Availability of radio communications services at the time of space weather events

Independently of the disasters observed on Earth, more than 600 space weather events are observed per solar cycle (11 years). When they occur during the response phase of a disaster (the first two weeks) they may seriously affect: satellite orientation, communication systems and navigation systems. Alert systems allow identifying in near real-time (Δt≤ 15 minutes) corrupted or missing communications. For the sake of convenience the space weather events discussed here are mainly those generated by “geomagnetic storms” characterized by Kp or K indexes. Applications are made: (i) during the response phase of the 26th December 2004 earthquake and its subsequent tsunami, and (ii) for near real time observations.

Robot d’intervention multifonction d’assistance post-catastrophe

REE N°3/2014 57 LES DRONES Tullio Joseph Tanzi1,2 , Jean Isnard2 Institut Mines-Telecom - Telecom ParisTech. LTCI UMR 5141 CNRS1 URSI commission F2 Introduction Depuis quelques mois, il ne se passe plus de se- maine sans que les medias, la presse, la television, ou la radio, n’evoquent le sujet des drones a usages civils. L’utilisation de drones eveille immediatement l’interet vis-a-vis de cette fonction de plate-forme d’observation a distance qui repond ainsi a l’inconscient de l’Homme qui, depuis des siecles, n’a eu de cesse de voler pour explorer depuis le ciel le monde et en particulier les zones difficilement accessibles. Cependant, les drones a usages civils representent bien plus que des ailes vir- tuelles ou qu’un « œil deporte ». Ils embarquent d’ores et deja des capteurs de toute nature destines a l’acqui- sition de multiples donnees, phase prealable et indis- pensable a leur traitement. Les capacites d’emport des drones permettent d’envisager l’integration de nom- breux capteurs. Les drones pourraient donc trouver une place d’assistant dans differentes applications, meme si cela necessite une plus grande auton