From the video description
In search and rescue missions, Micro Air Vehicles (MAV's) can assist rescuers to faster locate victims inside a large search area and to coordinate their efforts. Acoustic signals play an important role in outdoor rescue operations. Emergency whistles, as found on most aircraft life vests, are commonly carried by people engaging in outdoor activities, and are also used by rescue teams, as they allow to signal reliably over long distances and far beyond visibility. For a MAV involved in such missions, the ability to locate the source of a distress sound signal, such as an emergency whistle blown by a person in need of help, is therefore significantly important and would allow the localization of victims and rescuers during night time, through foliage and in adverse conditions such as dust, fog and smoke.
In this work we present a sound source localization system for a MAV to locate narrow-band sound sources on the ground, such as the sound of a whistle or personal alarm.
Basiri, M., Schill, F., Lima, P. U., & Floreano, D. (2012, October). Robust acoustic source localization of emergency signals from Micro Air Vehicles. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on (pp. 4737-4742). IEEE.
(Via Robots Dreams)
Comments
Found a legit free link to the research paper referenced here. Contains a lot of great info.
http://welcome.isr.ist.utl.pt/img/pdfs/2764_IROS2012_Meysam_final.pdf
Guys,
I have made contact with the project team, and this is very interesting indeed. Most interesting component (from an APM perspective) is the use of MAVLINK...and I think you can see where I'm going with this...;-)
If one of the devs wants to get involved (particularly if MAVLINK is your interest), please friend me, and I'll get you in the loop.
Anyway to make something like this using Arduino perhaps? Would be great to have coordinates for a specific event (In Mission Planner ) relative to a GPS location!
Very cool!
Very nice solution! I'm curious, whats the affect of the UAVs prop/motor noise on the system? Do you need to stop the motor and glide to get the best audio, or is it cancelled out? In the video, it kinda sounded like the motor was automatically reducing throttle every time the whistle blew but thats only a guess? Would it be better to move the microphones out to the wingtips, further from prop noise?
@ Gary, that technique is not so much in use anymore. In this year alone the mentioned technique of poaching accounts for less than 1% of all poaching incidents. All others were done with high calibre rifles, home made silencers with a <5 db attenuation in SPL. With our system we can already locate a gunshot from over 1km away during the day and even more at night.
This post which indicates the use of acoustic detection and localisation will be extremely successful, especially if you are searching for just one specific sound like a whistle which has a fixed tone at a fixed frequency(unlike gunshots). Using just 1 uav will provide a bearing to the sound source and triangulating the bearing from a 2nd uav will provide a fixed position. Well done!
@Petrus perhaps that's why vets dart guns being almost silent have become the weapon of choice.
nice to see another positive UAV story
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