Imagine a
building has collapsed. A team of first responders rushes to the scene and
rapidly begins surveying the area for survivors. They draw makeshift maps of
the area, so that incoming teams know what’s what. But newcomers don’t always
understand the depictions and each minute is crucial to save survivors.
Robin Murphy from
Texas A&M University (TAMU) lab and colleagues have a solution: deploy
several small unmanned air vehicles (SUAVs), such as AirRobot
quadrotors, to take snapshots of the rubble. The pictures are then uploaded
to a software program called RubbleViewer, which quickly builds a
three-dimensional map of the area that users can intuitively navigate. More efficient
than drawing by hand, this system is also cheaper and more portable than the
alternative–using helicopter-mounted lasers to map the rubble.
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Pictures from the
SUAVs are combined using the algorithms behind the panorama-making software PhotoSynth.
RubbleViewer extracts information from PhotoSynth’s data points to create the
three-dimensional map. It’s like putting a blanket over a bunch of needle
points, says Maarten van Zomeren, a graduate at the Delft University of
Technology in the Netherlands who helped developed the technology under supervisor and assistant professor Stijn Oomes.
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While PhotoSynth
has been coupled to applications like Live Search Maps and Google Maps to create enhanced, location-embedded panoramic
views, RubbleViewer is designed to be fast and easy to build, taking about half
an hour to create a topographic 3-D map of an area. What’s more, viewers can
click on a spot to annotate the map (showing the location of possible
survivors, for example) or call up the real photos tied to the spot. See the
video below for more.
The program is
still a prototype, but expert reviews will come out next month.
Murphy intends to
combine RubbleViewer with quadrotors and land-based, search-and-rescue robots
to create an easy-to-use first-responders system. Murphy is also working with
the Sketch
Recognition Lab at TAMU to develop electronic tablets for responders to
use. “Because it’s an emergency scenario it’s really important that people
don’t have to learn anything but can interact with the world in a way that’s
natural or intuitive to them,” says lab director and assistant professor Tracy
Hammond. “We have to enable as opposed to constraining them with
technologies.”
The team plans to
carry out the first tests of the combined system by the end of the summer.
