Introduction and Project Summary

A common issue in the search and rescue process for areas affected by natural disasters is that the location’s infrastructure and network would be compromised. This means that communication can be difficult when trying to explore unknown areas like collapsed buildings. Our project aims to solve this problem by using autonomous hexapods to go into unknown areas and utilize computer vision to identify survivors while also helping other rescue professionals get a better sense of the layout of unknown areas. These autonomous agents won’t require any kind of external wifi signal to communicate and instead would communicate with each other using a local network to effectively search an area using an distributed search algorithm. Each individual hexapod will be outfitted with a Jetson Nano which they will utilize to run object detection models in order to recognize survivors in areas for search and rescue. When hexapods find a survivor they will communicate with each other to bring the survivor first aid and also communicate with human search and rescue workers to coordinate a safe extraction.