Through the Rubble: Discovering the Invisible

To rescue human life trapped beneath the rubble (invisible to human or visual sensors) in the aftermath of an earthquake, we propose a human signature-based system that does three things efficiently - detects human life, its location, and the safe rescue path. This work has two novel contributions: a) The multi-robot rescue team equipped with our designed WiFi-based transmitter-receiver system to inspect the calamity site and detect human life without entering the rubble. b) The real-world earthquake rubble data is sparsely available and varies uncertainly across countries. We propose a system to collect human signatures unobtrusively pre-calamity, which helps in accurate human life detection post-calamity. We handle the data sparsity and uncertainty problem by proposing data decomposition and Variational Autoencoding (VAE) methods on the signature data. The results we achieve in a real-world calamity site set up with an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), drone, and robot manipulator system are promising as we can detect human life with 82% accuracy.