Autonomous Indoor Outdoor Safety Tracking system

The Europe population experiences yearly about 2 million to 2.5 million fires with 20 to 25 thousand deaths and 250 to 500 thousand reported injuries. Moreover. Even though satellite-based positioning technology allows rescue workers to already operate efficiently, GPS availability, reliability, and accuracy are often poor during outdoor fire operations, for example due to thick smoke, dense forests, rough terrain and inside buildings. In this context, the objective of AIOSAT (Autonomous Indoor & Outdoor Safety Tracking System) is to progress beyond the state of the art by defining the AIOSAT concept that aims to overcome aforementioned limitations of GNSS usage in rescue interventions and to extend it to indoor interventions. For this purpose, GNSS positions are enhanced with EGNOS and fused with position information inferred from IMU Pedestrian Dead Reckoning algorithms and Ultawideband RF interdistance. The main paths to the goal are the definition of the following milestones:

1. the end-user needs and system requirements for the AIOSAT system,
2. the Advanced Positioning Subsystem fused with a particle filter
3. the hybridized and standalone communications subsystem based on Lora and Bluetooth long range technologies
4. the tracking and alerting (TA) applications deployed on a portable tablet and on the Mobile Coordination Center,
5. the building an integration prototype system validated during field tests validated in 3 representatives scenarios: Household and industrial case in Twente Safety Campus (Netherlands), underground parking lot in Gent (Belgium) and difficult outdoor intervention in Extremadura (Spain)

The dissemination and use of the project outcomes are the ultimate objective. Therefore, in order to use and spread the knowledge acquired, a set of concrete, quantitative and customized activities is planned. The main strengths of the AIOSAT consortium are threefold.

1. It is composed of world class organizations with extensive and successful prior experience in the research topics related to the technologies employed.
2. The consortium involves two end-users, a technology provider, a university, a university-level military academy and two SMEs aiming at exploiting the project results as subsystem integrators, software and service providers. Other end-users and significant stakeholders are present in the advisory group.
3. Last but not least, the small consortium size avoids inefficiencies and work overhead typical for larger projects.