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.

We are determined to address the following key objectives:

1. Address the lack of autonomous systems capable of handling multiple, and often conflicting, operational needs with limited resources; understand trade-offs between localising the team accurately and mapping the environment thoroughly.
2. Provide holistic awareness about the incident; moving away from siloed systems of location, welfare and environment sensing, and design an integrated situation awareness system that provides continually evolving insights for decision making in a dynamically changing context.
3. Explore how and when the output of the situation awareness system should be presented to the response teams; how to best interact with their protocols, presenting the right information at the right time, and providing triggers and suggestions that offer cognitive assistance in complex and often life threatening situations.
4. Link the autonomy, situation awareness and cognitive assistance capabilities into an integrated system that provides valuable services to emergency teams.

Please visit EPSRC for additional information about this project.

Niki Trigoni	Andrew Markham	Muhamad Risqi Saputra	Vu Tran

Jonathan Gammell	Paul Newman	Rowan Border	Kevin Judd

University of Virginia - LinkLab Jack Stankovic

Queensland University of Technology Peter Corke

Changhao Chen