Smart Search-and-Rescue System in Highly Remote Natural Areas

Winiapp  provides a smart search-and-rescue system for saving nomads or mountaineers in highly remote natural areas.

There are many reports about lost mountaineering, older or even very young nomad people in remote natural areas. These lost persons usually have accidents and need rescue operations. If the rescue team could not find the lost victim quickly, they should look for the dead body in remote areas. So, in these scenarios, the search operation needs to be done very fast to find the exact location of lost person. In this regard, we successfully implemented the smart search-and-rescue (SAR) system based on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted low power and long range (LoRa) wireless network.

In this system, a very low power and lightweight LoRa end device is given to the nomads or mountaineers. Then, if the rescue operation is required, a flying LoRa gateway, which is a LoRa gateway mounted on a UAV, monitors the search environment to find the lost person. The flying LoRa gateway uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to find the LoRa end device location. At the same time, all the movements and operations are monitored at the rescue station. In this system, the flying LoRa gateway transmits the data and the UAV past trajectories toward the ground LoRa gateway connected to the portable computer at the rescue station. Our UAV-assisted SAR system has been successfully tested. Following our practical experiments, we could find the lost person equipped with a LoRa end device from 10 Km and 6 Km far away in the plain and slotted canyon, respectively.