Intelligent Drone Swarm for Search and Rescue Operations at Sea
This addresses the urgent need for improved rescue operations for migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea, though it appears incremental as it applies existing AI and drone technologies to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of search and rescue operations at sea during migrant crises by proposing an autonomous fleet of self-organizing intelligent drones, aiming to cover broader areas and speed up search processes to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
In recent years, a rising numbers of people arrived in the European Union, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea or overland through Southeast Europe in what has been later named as the European migrant crisis. In the last 5 years, more than 16 thousands people have lost their lives in the Mediterranean sea during the crossing. The United Nations Secretary General Strategy on New Technologies is supporting the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics to accelerate the achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which includes safe and regular migration processes among the others. In the same spirit, the central idea of this project aims at using AI technology for Search And Rescue (SAR) operations at sea. In particular, we propose an autonomous fleet of self-organizing intelligent drones that would enable the coverage of a broader area, speeding-up the search processes and finally increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of migrants rescue operations.