Title: Safe and Rapid Evacuation Facilitated by UAV Swarms
Grant agreement no: DG ECHO/H2020/783299
Duration: 1 january 2018 – 31 December 2019
Links: Website
Research area:
SWIFTERS leverages UAV swarms to study, design, develop, and test, UAV cooperation strategies to assist civil protection operations, such as emergency evacuation. This action has come together after seeing the great potentials of UAVs in emergency management during the DG ECHO PREDICATE project. In particular, PREDICATE demonstrated the use of standalone UAVs for watch-keeping and patrolling regions of interest in order to enhance the disaster prevention capabilities of civil protection and other relevant authorities. Building upon these previous action results, SWIFTERS is a continuation of the work conducted by the KIOS Research Center at the University of Cyprus (UCY-KIOS), the Center for Security Studies of the Ministry of Interior in the Hellenic Republic (KEMEA), and the Cyprus Civil Defence (CCD), i.e., all members of the PREDICATE project consortium.
The Direzione General della Protezione Civile Regione Sardegna Italy (RAS) is an additional Civil Protection authority that participates in the proposed action and has expressed great interest in enhancing the capabilities of their personnel with the envisioned UAV solutions. The main output of the proposed action will be a software package, which will be released under open-source license, featuring emergency operation planning capabilities enabled by UAV swarms such as task allocation to individual UAVs of the swarm (e.g., monitoring emergency event progress, identifying stranded survivors, marking the evacuation path, etc.), and path planning for each UAV. In addition, detailed training material and procedures will be developed through SWIFTERS to enable the consortium partners (3 Civil Protection organizations and 2 Research Institutes) and other interested parties to master the skills on UAV operations and familiarize in using the automated features proposed within SWIFTERS through small, medium and large scale exercises.
The project has received funding from the European Union Civil Protection Call for proposals 2017 for prevention and preparedness projects in the field of civil protection and marine pollution under grant agreement No 783299
