A Tandem Drone-ground Vehicle for Accessing Isolated Locations for First Aid Emergency Response in Case of Disaster

Abstract

The collapse of infrastructures is very often a complicating factor for the early emergency actuations after a disaster. A proper plan to better cover the needs of the affected people within the disaster area while maintaining life-saving relief operations is mandatory hence. In this paper, we use a drone for flying over a set of difficult-to-access locations for imaging issues to get information to build a risk assessment as the earliest stage of the emergency operations. While the drone provides the flexibility required to visit subsequently a sort of isolated locations, it needs a commando vehicle in ground for (i) monitoring the deployment of operations and (ii) being a recharging station where the drone gets fresh batteries. This work proposes a decision-making process to plan the mission, which is composed by the ground vehicle stopping points and the sequence of locations visited for each drone route. We propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA) which has proven to be helpful in finding good solutions in short computing times. We provide experimental analysis on the factors effecting the performance of the output solutions, around an illustrative test instance. Results show the applicability of these techniques for providing proper solutions to the studied problem.