Environmentally-Aware and Energy-Efficient Multi-Drone Coordination and Networking for Disaster Response

In a Disaster Response Management (DRM) Scenario, Communication and Coordination Are Limited, and Absence of Related Infrastructure Hinders Situational Awareness. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Drones Provide New Capabilities for DRM to Address These Barriers. However, There is a Dearth of Works that Address Multiple Heterogeneous Drones Collaboratively Working Together to Form a Flying Ad-Hoc Network (FANET) with Air-To-Air and Air-To-Ground Links that Are Impacted By: (I) Environmental Obstacles, (Ii) Wind, and (Iii) Limited Battery Capacities. in This Paper, We Present a Novel Environmentally-Aware and Energy-Efficient Multi-Drone Coordination and Networking Scheme that Features a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Location Prediction Algorithm Coupled with a Packet Forwarding Algorithm for Drone-To-Ground Network Establishment. We Specifically Present Two Novel Drone Location-Based Solutions (I.e., Heuristic Greedy, and Learning-Based) in Our Packet Forwarding Approach to Support Application Requirements. These Requirements Involve Improving Connectivity (I.e., Optimize Packet Delivery Ratio and End-To-End Delay) Despite Environmental Obstacles, and Improving Efficiency (I.e., by Lower Energy Use and Time Consumption) Despite Energy Constraints. We Evaluate Our Scheme with State-Of-The-Art Networking Algorithms in a Trace-Based DRM FANET Simulation Testbed Featuring Rural and Metropolitan Areas. Results Show that Our Strategy overcomes Obstacles and Can Achieve 81-To-90% of Network Connectivity Performance Observed under No Obstacle Conditions. in the Presence of Obstacles, Our Scheme Improves the Network Connectivity Performance by 14-To-38% While Also Providing 23-To-54% of Energy Savings in Rural Areas; the Same in Metropolitan Areas Achieved an Average of 25% Gain When Compared with Baseline Obstacle Awareness Approaches with 15-To-76% of Energy Savings

Communication and Control in Collaborative UAVs: Recent Advances and Future Trends

The recent progress in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technology has significantly advanced UAV-based applications for military, civil, and commercial domains. Nevertheless, the challenges of establishing high-speed communication links, flexible control strategies, and developing efficient collaborative decision-making algorithms for a swarm of UAVs limit their autonomy, robustness, and reliability. Thus, a growing focus has been witnessed on collaborative communication to allow a swarm of UAVs to coordinate and communicate autonomously for the cooperative completion of tasks in a short time with improved efficiency and reliability. This work presents a comprehensive review of collaborative communication in a multi-UAV system. We thoroughly discuss the characteristics of intelligent UAVs and their communication and control requirements for autonomous collaboration and coordination. Moreover, we review various UAV collaboration tasks, summarize the applications of UAV swarm networks for dense urban environments and present the use case scenarios to highlight the current developments of UAV-based applications in various domains. Finally, we identify several exciting future research direction that needs attention for advancing the research in collaborative UAVs

Cultivating Lifelong Donors: Stewardship and the Fundraising Pyramid

This handbook helps nonprofits build long-term giving programs that span the entire supporter lifecycle, from engagement through the end of life. It highlights strategies for engaging new supporters online, investigates the characteristics of loyal donors, examines the importance of developing personal relationships with transitional giving prospects, and discusses donor cultivation

Autonomous Capabilities for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Conducting Radiological Response: Findings from a High-fidelity Discovery Experiment

This article presents a preliminary work domain theory and identifies autonomous vehicle, navigational, and mission capabilities and challenges for small unmanned aerial systems (SUASs) responding to a radiological disaster. Radiological events are representative of applications that involve flying at low altitudes and close proximities to structures. To more formally understand the guidance and control demands, the environment in which the SUAS has to function, and the expected missions, tasks, and strategies to respond to an incident, a discovery experiment was performed in 2013. The experiment placed a radiological source emitting at 10 times background radiation in the simulated collapse of a multistory hospital. Two SUASs, an AirRobot 100B and a Leptron Avenger, were inserted with subject matter experts into the response, providing high operational fidelity. The SUASs were expected by the responders to fly at altitudes between 0.3 and 30 m, and hover at 1.5 m from urban structures. The proximity to a building introduced a decrease in GPS satellite coverage, challenging existing vehicle autonomy. Five new navigational capabilities were identified: scan, obstacle avoidance, contour following, environment-aware return to home, andreturn to highest reading. Furthermore, the data-to-decision process could be improved with autonomous data digestion and visualization capabilities. This article is expected to contribute to a better understanding of autonomy in a SUAS, serve as a requirement document for advanced autonomy, and illustrate how discovery experimentation serves as a design tool for autonomous vehicles

迅速な災害管理のための即時的,持続可能，かつ拡張的なエッジコンピューティングの研究

本学位論文は、迅速な災害管理におけるいくつかの問題に取り組んだ。既存のネットワークインフラが災害による直接的なダメージや停電によって使えないことを想定し、本論文では、最新のICTを用いた次世代災害支援システムの構築を目指す。以下のとおり本論文は三部で構成される。第一部は、災害発生後の緊急ネットワーキングである。本論文では、情報指向フォグコンピューティング（Information-Centric Fog Computing）というアーキテクチャを提案し、既存のインフラがダウンした場合に臨時的なネットワーク接続を提供する。本論文では、六次の隔たり理論から着想を得て、緊急時向け名前ベースルーティング（Name-Based Routing）を考慮した。まず、二層の情報指向フォグコンピューティングネットワークモデルを提案した。次に、ソーシャルネットワークを元に、情報指向フォグノード間の関係をモデリングし、名前ベースルーティングプロトコルをデザインする。シミュレーション実験では、既存のソリューションと比較し、提案手法はより高い性能を示し、有用性が証明された。第二部は、ネットワークの通信効率の最適化である。本論文は、第一部で構築されたネットワークの通信効率を最適化し、ネットワークの持続時間を延ばすために、ネットワークのエッジで行われるキャッシングストラテジーを提案した。本論文では、まず、第一部で提案した二層ネットワークモデルをベースにサーバー層も加えて、異種ネットワークストラクチャーを構成した。次に、緊急時向けのエッジキャッシングに必要なTime to Live （TTL）とキャッシュ置換ポリシーを設計する。シミュレーション実験では、エネルギー消費とバックホールレートを性能指標とし、メモリ内キャッシュとディスクキャッシュの性能を比較した。結果では、メモリ内ストレージと処理がエッジキャッシングのエネルギーを節約し、かなりのワークロードを共有できることが示された。第三部は、ネットワークカバレッジの拡大である。本論文は、ドローンの関連技術とリアルタイム視覚認識技術を利用し、被災地のユーザ捜索とドローンの空中ナビゲーションを行う。災害管理におけるドローン制御に関する研究を調査し、現在のドローン技術と無人捜索救助に対する実際のニーズを考慮すると、軽量なソリューションが緊急時に必要であることが判明した。そのため本論文では、転移学習を利用し、ドローンに搭載されたオンボードコンピュータで実行可能な空中ビジョンに基づいたナビゲーションアプローチを開発した。シミュレーション実験では、1/150ミニチュアモデルを用いて、空中ナビゲーションの実行可能性をテストした。結果では、本論文で提案するドローンの軽量ナビゲーションはフィードバックに基づいてリアルタイムに飛行の微調整を実現でき、既存手法と比較して性能において大きな進歩を示した。This dissertation mainly focuses on solving the problems in agile disaster management. To face the situation when the original network infrastructure no longer works because of disaster damage or power outage, I come up with the idea of introducing different emerging technologies in building a next-generation disaster response system. There are three parts of my research. In the first part of emergency networking, I design an information-centric fog computing architecture to fast build a temporary emergency network while the original ones can not be used. I focus on solving name-based routing for disaster relief by applying the idea from six degrees of separation theory. I first put forward a 2-tier information-centric fog network architecture under the scenario of post-disaster. Then I model the relationships among ICN nodes based on delivered files and propose a name-based routing strategy to enable fast networking and emergency communication. I compare with DNRP under the same experimental settings and prove that my strategy can achieve higher work performance. In the second part of efficiency optimization, I introduce the idea of edge caching in prolong the lifetime of the rebuilt network. I focus on how to improve the energy efficiency of edge caching using in-memory storage and processing. Here I build a 3-tier heterogeneous network structure and propose two edge caching methods using different TTL designs & cache replacement policies. I use total energy consumption and backhaul rate as the two metrics to test the performance of the in-memory caching method and compare it with the conventional method based on disk storage. The simulation results show that in-memory storage and processing can help save more energy in edge caching and share a considerable workload in percentage. In the third part of coverage expansion, I apply UAV technology and real-time image recognition in user search and autonomous navigation. I focus on the problem of designing a navigation strategy based on the airborne vision for UAV disaster relief. After the survey of related works on UAV fly control in disaster management, I find that in consideration of the current UAV manufacturing technology and actual demand on unmanned search & rescue, a lightweight solution is in urgent need. As a result, I design a lightweight navigation strategy based on visual recognition using transfer learning. In the simulation, I evaluate my solutions using 1/150 miniature models and test the feasibility of the navigation strategy. The results show that my design on visual recognition has the potential for a breakthrough in performance and the idea of UAV lightweight navigation can realize real-time flight adjustment based on feedback.室蘭工業大学 (Muroran Institute of Technology)博士（工学

Aerial Base Station Deployment for Post-Disaster Public Safety Applications

Earthquakes and floods are constant threats to most of the countries in the world. After such catastrophes, a rapid response is needed, which includes communications not only for first responders but also for local civilians. Even though there are technologies and specialized personnel for rapid deployment, it is common that external factors will hinder the arrival of help while communication requirements are urgently required. Such communication technologies would aid tasks regarding organization and information dissemination from authorities to the civilians and vice-versa. This necessity is due to protocols and applications to allocate the number of emergency resources per location and to locate missing people. In this thesis, we investigate the deployment problem of Mobile Aerial Base Stations (MABS). Our main objective is to ensure periodic wireless communication for geographically spread User Equipment (UE) based on LTE technology. First, we establish a precedent of emergency situations where MABS would be useful. We also provide an introduction to the study and work conducted in this thesis. Second, we provide a literature review of existing solutions was made to determine the advantages and disadvantages of certain technologies regarding the described necessity. Third, we determine how MABS, such as gliders or light tactical balloons that are assumed to be moving at an average speed of 50 km/h, will be deployed. These MABS would visit different cluster centroids determined by an Affinity Propagation Clustering algorithm. Additionally, a combination of graph theory and Genetic Algorithm (GA) is implemented through mutators and fitness functions to obtain best flyable paths through an evolution pool of 100. Additionally, Poisson, Normal, and Uniform distributions are utilized to determine the amount of Base Stations and UEs. Then, for every distribution combination, a set of simulations is conducted to obtain the best flyable paths. Serviced UE performance indicators of algorithm efficiency are analyzed to determine whether the applied algorithm is effective in providing a solution to the presented problem. Finally, in Chapter 5, we conclude our work by supporting that the proposed model would suffice the needs of mobile users given the proposed emergency scenario. Adviser: Yi Qia

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio