Publications related to Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones

Gas Sensing with Rotary-Wing Nano Aerial Vehicles

Harmful chemical compounds are released daily in warehouses, chemical plants and during environmental emergencies. Their uncontrolled dispersion contributes to the pollution of the atmosphere and threatens human and animal lives. When gas leaks occur, the ...

EPFL2024

Vision-based Flocking in Aerial Robot Swarms

Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Aerial robot swarms have the potential to perform time-critical and dangerous tasks such as disaster response without compromising human safety. However, their reliance on external infrastructure such as global positioning for localization and wireless net ...

EPFL2022

Practical issues with modeling extreme Brazilian rainfall

Anthony Christopher Davison, Isolde Santos Previdelli, Paulo Vitor Da Costa Pereira

Accurately quantifying extreme rainfall is important for the design of hydraulic structures, for flood mapping and zoning and for disaster management. In order to produce maps of estimates of 25-year rainfall return levels in Brazil, we selected 893 shorte ...

BRAZILIAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION2021

The challenges of impact evaluation: Attempting to measure the effectiveness of community-based disaster risk management

Anthony Christopher Davison, Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler, Alfredo Rafael Kägi Trejo

Although disaster risk management is becoming increasingly important in development cooperation, there is still a lack of robust evidence regarding its effectiveness. Few studies based on a counterfactual have been conducted in the fields of disaster manag ...

2020

UWB-based system for UAV Localization in GNSS-Denied Environments: Characterization and Dataset

Dario Floreano, Fabrizio Schiano

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have penetrated multiple domains over the past years. In GNSS-denied or indoor environments, aerial robots require a robust and stable localization system, often with external feedback, in order to fly safely. Motion ca ...

2020

Flexible Disaster Response of Tomorrow: Final Presentation and Evaluation of the CENTAURO System

Xi Chen, Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Mobile manipulation robots have great potential for roles in support of rescuers on disaster-response missions. Robots can operate in places too dangerous for humans and therefore can assist in accomplishing hazardous tasks while their human operators work ...

2019

UAV-Based Situational Awareness System Using Deep Learning

Wenlong Deng

Situational awareness by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is important for many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue, and disaster response. In those applications, detecting and locating people and recognizing their actions in near real-time ...

2019

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Dario Floreano, Auke Ijspeert, Roland Siegwart, Stefano Mintchev, Kamilo Andres Melo Becerra, Davide Scaramuzza, Tomislav Horvat, Marco Hutter

Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly rel ...

2019

Community-based landslide risk reduction: a review of a Red Cross soil bioengineering for resilience program in Honduras

Silvia Hostettler, Antonio D'Acunzi

Effective long-term participation of communities in disaster risk reduction measures in landslide-prone areas continues to be a challenge. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which community-based soil-bioengineering techniques allow for effective mi ...

2019

Essays on adaptation to rare disasters

Takafumi Usui

This thesis aims to further investigate rare natural disasters and studies adaptation decisions under uncertainty by solving several computational economic models. The modeling of rare natural disasters depends on the treatment of catastrophic outcomes wit ...

EPFL2019