Fire-Resistant Wall-Climbing UAV for Victim Detection in Urban Search and Rescue Missions

Vedant Hambire, Harsh Yadav, Dipshikha Hazari, Satyam Singh

2025

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become invaluable in high-stakes search and rescue operations in fire-prone and fire-damaged environments due to their capabilities in victim locating and situation analysis. This paper describes the design, simulation, and realization of a fire-resistant, wall-climbing UAV with a human alive detection system powered by AI. The UAV includes a custom-designed H-frame made out of PLA which is thrust vectoring EDFs attached to a tilt-rotor system permitting vertical hovering and traversing. Structural and aerodynamic aspects were verified with FEA and CFD simulations performed on SimScale. To allow for autonomous victim detection, the UAV system includes a real-time human detector based on YOLOv8 with and optical flow and MediaPipe-based eye tracking to classify people as conscious, unconscious, dead, or blocked out. The UAV's mission computer, which comprises a Raspberry Pi with ROS, records would-detect status and location, and outputs tagged geo-coordinates for mission planning in real-time. Simulation and ground testing would confirm the system’s viability in heat-intensive, debris-laden environments, advancing the development of autonomous aerial platforms for disaster response, firefighting, and urban search and rescue (USAR) operations.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Hambire V., Yadav H., Hazari D. and Singh S. (2025). Fire-Resistant Wall-Climbing UAV for Victim Detection in Urban Search and Rescue Missions. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO; ISBN 978-989-758-770-2, SciTePress, pages 417-424. DOI: 10.5220/0013838500003982

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco25,
author={Vedant Hambire and Harsh Yadav and Dipshikha Hazari and Satyam Singh},
title={Fire-Resistant Wall-Climbing UAV for Victim Detection in Urban Search and Rescue Missions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO},
year={2025},
pages={417-424},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013838500003982},
isbn={978-989-758-770-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO
TI - Fire-Resistant Wall-Climbing UAV for Victim Detection in Urban Search and Rescue Missions
SN - 978-989-758-770-2
AU - Hambire V.
AU - Yadav H.
AU - Hazari D.
AU - Singh S.
PY - 2025
SP - 417
EP - 424
DO - 10.5220/0013838500003982
PB - SciTePress