ACE-OPS: From Autonomy to Cognitive assistance in Emergency OPerationS

这一多中心协作项目的愿景是，通过提供传感、态势感知、认知援助和移动自主能力，作为一个单一系统协同工作，保障和改变应急小组目前的操作协议。英国内政部收集的统计数据显示，2016/2017年期间，英格兰有346人死于火灾，这是自2011/12年以来的最高数字。在过去的10年里，美国有2775名消防员殉职。当需要从燃烧或被水淹没的建筑物中拯救和疏散人员时，重要的是，首席事故指挥官要提高态势感知能力，能够有效地协调救援行动，个人响应者要提高对周围危险和危险的可视性。为此，我们需要结合英国在移动自主和人员本地化方面的专业知识，弗吉尼亚大学在福利监测和认知辅助方面的国际领先专业知识，以及昆士兰科技大学在无人机应用机器人视觉方面的专业知识。拟议的工作涉及四个不同的研究方向：1)提供一个综合的情况感知系统，包括紧急救援人员的定位，监测他们的福利和动态变化环境的映射；2)探索如何将态势感知信息输入认知辅助工具，以便为事件指挥官及其团队提供有用的触发和警报；3)引入不同级别的自主性，使飞行器能够同时执行测绘、通信和定位任务；4)整合上述能力，构建首个端到端响应系统，实现从传感器采集到应急响应，再返回到传感器驱动的完整反馈回路。人们可穿戴设备上的传感器与安装在飞行器上的传感器将有助于获取福利、位置和环境监测方面的数据。这反过来又将为应急反应小组的认知援助提供投入，帮助他们评估局势。然后，它们将依次向传感器系统提供反馈，以优先监控特定区域、人员或任务，从而动态影响下一轮的情况感知，等等。这种反馈回路将是一个阶段性的变化，为紧急救援人员提供一种全新的安全方法。

The vision of this collaborative multi-centre project is to safeguard and transform current operation protocols of emergency teams by providing sensing, situation awareness, cognitive assistance and mobile autonomy capabilities working synergistically as a single system. Statistics collected by the Home Office report 346 fire related fatalities in England during 2016/2017, the highest figure since 2011/12. Over a 10-year period in USA, 2775 firefighters died on duty. Where there is a need to save and evacuate people from a burning or flooded building, it is important for the chief incident commander to have increased situational awareness and to be able to effectively coordinate the rescue operation, and for individual responders to have enhanced visibility of surrounding hazards and dangers. To this end, we need to combine UK-based expertise in mobile autonomy and people localisation, with internationally leading expertise on welfare monitoring and cognitive assistance at the Univ. of Virginia, and on robotic vision applied to aerial vehicles at the Queensland University of Technology. The proposed work involves four distinct research directions: 1) providing an integrated system for situation awareness that involves localisation of the emergency responders, monitoring of their welfare and mapping of the dynamically changing environment; 2) exploring how situation awareness information should be fed into cognitive assistance tools, in order to provide helpful triggers and alerts to the incident commander and their team; 3) introducing various levels of autonomy enabling aerial vehicles to simultaneously perform tasks of mapping, communication and localisation; and 4) integrating the above capabilities and building the first end-to-end response system that implements the full feedback loop from sensor acquisition to emergency responders and back to sensor actuation. Sensors on people's wearable devices together with sensors mounted on aerial vehicles will contribute to data acquisition for welfare, location and environment monitoring. This in turn will provide input to cognitive assistance for emergency response teams, helping them to assess the situation. They will then in turn provide feedback to sensor systems to prioritise monitoring of specific areas, people or tasks, thus dynamically influencing the next round of situation awareness, and so on. This feedback loop will be a step change providing a whole new approach to safety for emergency responders.