Semi-Autonomous Control of Drones/UAVs for Wilderness Search and Rescue

Wilderness search and rescue (WiSAR) has been one of the most significant robotic applications in the past decade. In order to succeed in these life-saving operations, the deployment of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become an inevitable trend. This paper presents the development of a low-cost solution for semi-autonomous control of drones/UAVs in WiSAR applications. ArduPilot based flight controller was implemented to enable autonomous trajectory following of the drones/UAVs. A high resolution action camera attached to the drone/UAV was used to take video footage during the flight, which was related to the GPS location through the time stamp. The recorded video footage was manually transferred to a laptop for potential target detection using OpenCV and YOLOv3. The system design is reported in detail, and experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the developed system.