PhD Position: Intelligent drone swarm for Search-and- Rescue (SAR)

Context:

In Search-and-Rescue (SAR) operations, speed in finding victims is key to saving lives. The simultaneous use of drone swarm during an operation, allows for a larger search area to be covered and in principle, increases the chances of finding victims in the case of civil disasters or stranded soldiers in armed conflicts. Advances in Artificial Intelli- gence (AI) for image analysis make it possible to automate victim search in the video streams from drone onboard camera (visible light, thermal, LiDAR, milliwave radar, etc). However, it is necessary for the communication between the operator's remote control- ler and the drones to support the volume of information transmitted by the drones using Intelligent tactical network for drone swarm.

The miniaturization and very low cost of these flying robots make it possible today to use it in uses cases in SAR domains, would enable efficient rescue operations and relief provisioning, increasing survivability and resiliency. Theirs use presents several chal- lenges in terms of navigation, coordination, computing and communication between drones as well as operators.

Main objective and scientific challenges:

This Ph. D. aims to combine research and technologies in drone swarm coordination and embedded AI tactical networks:

Embedded AI for drones swarm: One aim of this thesis is to coordinate swarm drone system evolving in a survey area for SAR applications, to achieve this aim, every drone includes embedded AI at different levels: Embedded AI for computer vision, and Intelligent tactical network for drone swarm.

Tactical networks for drones’ swarm: Other communication aim is to build a tactical network combining public networks (4G/5G) and private IoT networks using LoRa- WAN, LTE-M or NB-IoT, DECT-NR+ with several topologies (star, mesh). The tacti- cal network enables both resilient communications and positioning.

LIG: https://www.liglab.fr/fr

Skills:

The candidate must have a Master in computer science, robotics, telecommunications or closely related fields.
Knowledge in robotics is required. Experience with aerial vehicles and/or communica- tion will be appreciated.