Integrated Rescue Group for Landslide Disaster Management

Abstract

The disaster situations such as earth slips, earthquakes and collapsing of high rise structures or tunnels demands immediate rescue of the affected. However, on studying the past incidents it was understood that rescue operations could not be launched immediately after an incident due to: nonavailability of infrastructure and detection systems of humans immediately onsite, risk of repetition of the occurrence such as further earth slips, limitations of detection at night times mostly after an earth slip occurred, natural reluctance of taking the risk of proceeding into danger by humans specially during dark hours. At this backdrop, it is well understood that there is an obvious limitation in surveillance and detection capability of human based rescue parties. Furthermore, the risk of utilizing further lives for rescue operations may not justify, if repetition of the occurrence is very much imminent. However, rescuing of the affected lives demands immediate attention and delaying the same may aggravate the possible endeavors as well as may nullify the effectiveness of further rescue efforts. This research endeavors to add an effective additional dimension to the disaster rescue operations by addition of movability, longer range and close vicinity surveillance by utilizing a group of quadcopter, crawling and earth piercing robots. All platforms are being equipped with a detector for thermal signature. The proposed solution keeps the humans at bay and could prevent risking human lives, but utterly risking the robots. Above all, this prevents the requirement of 24×7 based continuous monitoring, thereby provides some physical and psychological freedom to human rescue parties, who could be utilized else where such as providing first aid to the rescued humans.