Intelligent vehicle for search, rescue and transportation purposes

Recent development in micro-electronics technologies as well as the computer vision techniques increased demand to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in several industrial and civil applications. This paper proposed a vision based system, that is used in UAVs for search, rescue and transportation purposes. The proposed system is divided into two main parts: Vision-based object detection and classification, in which, a Kinect V2 sensor is used; to extract the objects from the ground plane, and estimate the distance to the UAV. In addition, Support Vector Machine (SVM) human detector based on Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features is applied to classify the human bodies from the all detected objects. Secondly, a semi-autonomous reactive control for visual servoing system is implemented; to control the position and the velocity of the UAV for performing safe approaching maneuvers to the detected objects. The proposed system has been validated by performing several real flights, and the obtained results show the high robustness and accuracy of the system.