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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AIOSAT (Autonomous Indoor Outdoor SafetyTracking system)

Teaser

Summary

The European population experiences yearly about 2 million to 2.5 million fires with 20 to 25 thousand deaths and 250 to 500 thousand reported injuries. Even though satellite-based positioning technology allows rescue workers to already operate efficiently, GNSS availability, reliability, and accuracy are often poor during fire operations, for example due to thick smoke, dense forests, rough terrain and inside buildings. As such, location information quite often needs to be augmented by tedious manual observations from firefighters who are already busy executing their stressful firefighting and rescue tasks.
â€œWhen firefighters can work safer and more efficiently, they can also save more livesâ€. In this context, the objective of AIOSAT (Autonomous Indoor & Outdoor Safety Tracking system) is to progress beyond the state of the art by defining the AIOSAT concept that aims to overcome aforementioned limitations. AIOSAT will build on the results of successful preceding projects and will focus on the evolution of European GNSS, such as Galileo and EGNOS, positioning, wireless communications, and tracking and alerting (TA) for emergency workers during fire rescue operations.
The key AIOSAT innovation targets are the research and integration of
Augmented GNSS positioning supported by differential corrections on the code to assure a trustful positioning estimation for safety critical applications, additionally with IMU, RF fusion and map information to obtain high-availability and accurate positioning,
A high availability communication system based on a robust long range radio link to send the differential code corrections and the status data, and
An efficient TA backend enabling the brigades and mission commanders to track the location of the safety workers during a mission and alert firefighters, in order to minimize the risk of accidents and increase the mission success.

Work performed

First, the user needs and the system requirements have been deduced from all the inputs that the consortium has gathered from the diverse end users consulted (internal partners, partners from the advisory board and external teams). From these system requirements, the different alternatives for the system architecture have been contemplated for block diagrams and for data relationships. D2.1 and D2.2 are the main results of this work.
In parallel, the three representative testing scenarios and the validation methodology for the generic and the specific cases have been set out in the deliverable D6.1.
Up to this point, the user needs are linked with the system and subsystems requirements and these are all crossed with the steps of the validation steps.
On the core technical work packages, the solution of the position depends on a fused architecture with multi-sensors inputs. Pedestrian Dear Reckoning algorithm from IMU, inter-distances with UWB technology and GNSS data with different alternatives of augmentation are gathered into a particle based fusion algorithm. This represent the structure of each node with the adequate power supply, antennas and other relevant interfaces for the application of the project. And, then, comes the relationships between the nodes with an operationally innovative combination of a communication radios. The AIOSAT communication solution consists of a dual link (low- rate long-range sub-1Ghz and bluetooth low energy) decentralized, deployable communication system supporting the continuous and reliable reporting of responders position coordinates with the exchange of status and safety-related data. During the first period report, simulations have been performed with synthetic data, but real synchronized data were also possible with the first version of the integrated prototype. However, this first version has been quickly updated with the lessons learned from it.
On the visualization part, the first version of the android based sub-officer tracking application has been deployed into a tablet for an on-site control of the members of the team and their data. Now, this work needs to be completed with the control baseâ€™s (MCCâ€™s) platform and application where the alerting algorithm will be deployed.
In the first period of the project, the management and dissemination activities have been centered on the discussion and agreement of the Data Management Plan (D1.12), the factsheet (D7.2), the project website and social networks accounts (D7.3) and the project dissemination and communication plan (D7.4). These basic documents have helped the consortium to fix the attention on the utility of the results and to communicate them to the right audience. There are also progresses on non-technical forums related to safety, crisis response and management and innovation for first responders.

Final results

The work carried out towards the critical objectives is explained in the next paragraphs. That shows the progress beyond the state of the art in terms of system and result.
1. Enable a high availability and high integrity team positioning and tracking system based on GNSS, EGNOS and fusion of IMU, RF-ranging and map data, able to work inside buildings and rural areas:
The system and subsystems requirements have been set based on the user needs. Then, we have developed the first versions of the subsystems and of the processing algorithms to obtain the data needed for the fusion algorithm, which is one of the key of the system and a remarkable progress beyond the state of the art as it improves the continuity and availability. The improvement on the integrity function is fused with the support of the external augmentation system.
2. Develop a set of tracking and alerting application protocols for fire services which radically improve responder safety by reducing life and health risks during fire suppression operations within structures and forest environments:
First, the end-users have been key to decide which are the operational rules and assumptions for tracking and alerting the firefighters during an intervention. One of the main points was to be sure that AIOSAT system will be completely interoperable with the nowadays procedures. For this point, the progress beyond the state of the art is the work of concentrating the user needs from several inputs from different countries into a common document. Also, the deduction of the system and subsystems requirements from these user needs is something valuable for the end users. Then, with the position and other valuable data from every node, the alerting algorithms have been started. The first implementation has been into the subofficer portable app.
3. Reduce the impact of fires on health, environment and economy by enabling improved fire suppression operations founded on increased safety trust of firefighters and fire chiefs:
This objective is the most generic one in terms of technical activity and will be fairly judged at the end of the project and afterwards. However, this is one of the main points that is taken into account for the design of the overall system. From one side, the architecture and the communications of the system is doubled, with diversity of technologies, to increase the reliability on the data transmission. From the other side, all the data of every intervention are logged and could be reproduced on the subofficer application to analyse what happened and what could be improved. Our aim is to make the firefighters feel safer and even better on what they already master.