Disaster robotics has become a research area in its own right, with several reported cases of successful robot deployment in actual disaster scenarios. Most of these disaster deployments use aerial, ground, or underwater robotic platforms. However, the research involving autonomous boats or Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) for Disaster Management (DM) is currently spread across several publications, with varying degrees of depth, and focusing on more than one unmanned vehicle—usually under the umbrella of Unmanned Marine Vessels (UMV). Therefore, the current importance of USVs for the DM process in its different phases is not clear. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey about the applications and roles of USVs for DM, as far as we know. This work demonstrates that there are few current deployments in disaster scenarios, with most of the research in the area focusing on the technological aspects of USV hardware and software, such as Guidance Navigation and Control, and not focusing on their actual importance for DM. Finally, to guide future research, this paper also summarizes our own contributions, the lessons learned, guidelines, and research gaps.
The use of robotics in disaster scenarios has become a reality. However, an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) needs a robust navigation strategy to face unpredictable environmental forces such as waves, wind, and water current. A starting step toward this goal is to have a programming environment with realistic USV models where designers can assess their control strategies under different degrees of environmental disturbances. This paper presents a simulation environment integrated with robotic middleware which models the forces that act on a USV in a disaster scenario. Results show that these environmental forces affect the USV’s trajectories negatively, indicating the need for more research on USV control strategies considering harsh environmental conditions. Evaluation scenarios were presented to highlight specific features of the simulator, including a bridge inspection scenario with fast water current and winds.
In this paper, we investigate the influence of holidays and community mobility on the transmission rate and death count of COVID-19 in Brazil. We identify national holidays and hallmark holidays to assess their effect on disease reports of confirmed cases and deaths. First, we use a one-variate model with the number of infected people as input data to forecast the number of deaths. This simple model is compared with a more robust deep learning multi-variate model that uses mobility and transmission rates (R0, Re) from a SEIRD model as input data. A principal components model of community mobility, generated by the principal component analysis (PCA) method, is added to improve the input features for the multi-variate model. The deep learning model architecture is an LSTM stacked layer combined with a dense layer to regress daily deaths caused by COVID-19. The multi-variate model incremented with engineered input features can enhance the forecast performance by up to 18.99% compared to the standard one-variate data-driven model.
Path planning for sailboat robots is a challenging task particularly due to the kinematics and dynamics modelling of such kinds of wind propelled boats. The problem is divided into two layers. The first one is global were a general trajectory composed of waypoints is planned, which can be done automatically based on some variables such as weather conditions or defined by hand using some human–robot interface (a ground-station). In the second local layer, at execution time, the global route should be followed by making the sailboat proceed between each pair of consecutive waypoints. Our proposal in this paper is an algorithm for the global, path generation layer, which has been developed for the N-Boat (The Sailboat Robot project), in order to compute feasible sailing routes between a start and a target point while avoiding dangerous situations such as obstacles and borders. A reinforcement learning approach (Q-Learning) is used based on a reward matrix and a set of actions that changes according to wind directions to account for the dead zone, which is the region against the wind where the sailboat can not gain velocity. Our algorithm generates straight and zigzag paths accounting for wind direction. The path generated also guarantees the sailboat safety and robustness, enabling it to sail for long periods of time, depending only on the start and target points defined for this global planning. The result is the development of a complete path planner algorithm that, together with the local planner solved in previous work, can be used to allow the final developments of an N-Boat making it a fully autonomous sailboat.
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