Publications related to Disaster response

Vision-based Flocking in Aerial Robot Swarms

Aerial robot swarms have the potential to perform time-critical and dangerous tasks such as disaster response without compromising human safety. However, their reliance on external infrastructure such as global positioning for localization and wireless net ...

EPFL2022

Towards Efficient Correction of Coconut Tree Detection Errors

Devis Tuia, Diego Michael Schibli

Coconut tree plantations are one of the main sources of income in several South Pacific countries. Thus, keeping track of the location of coconut trees is important for monitoring and post-disaster assessment. Although deep learning based object detectors ...

IEEE2022

Practical issues with modeling extreme Brazilian rainfall

Anthony Christopher Davison, Isolde Santos Previdelli, Paulo Vitor Da Costa Pereira

Accurately quantifying extreme rainfall is important for the design of hydraulic structures, for flood mapping and zoning and for disaster management. In order to produce maps of estimates of 25-year rainfall return levels in Brazil, we selected 893 shorte ...

BRAZILIAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION2021

A risk-based multi-level stress test methodology: application to six critical non-nuclear infrastructures in Europe

Anton Schleiss, José Pedro Gamito de Saldanha Calado Matos, Daniela Rodrigues

Recent natural disasters that seriously affected critical infrastructure (CI) with significant socio-economic losses and impact revealed the need for the development of reliable methodologies for vulnerability and risk assessment. In this paper, a risk-bas ...

2020

The challenges of impact evaluation: Attempting to measure the effectiveness of community-based disaster risk management

Anthony Christopher Davison, Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler, Alfredo Rafael Kägi Trejo

Although disaster risk management is becoming increasingly important in development cooperation, there is still a lack of robust evidence regarding its effectiveness. Few studies based on a counterfactual have been conducted in the fields of disaster manag ...

2020

Barriers to the implementation of international agreements on the ground: Climate change and resilience building in the Araucanía Region of Chile

Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler

Implementing disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation and mitigation (CCA/M), and sustainable development are key to increasing community resilience to pressing climate change risks. Barriers to grassroots implementation of national and int ...

2020

Flexible Disaster Response of Tomorrow: Final Presentation and Evaluation of the CENTAURO System

Xi Chen, Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Mobile manipulation robots have great potential for roles in support of rescuers on disaster-response missions. Robots can operate in places too dangerous for humans and therefore can assist in accomplishing hazardous tasks while their human operators work ...

2019

UAV-Based Situational Awareness System Using Deep Learning

Wenlong Deng

Situational awareness by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is important for many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue, and disaster response. In those applications, detecting and locating people and recognizing their actions in near real-time ...

2019

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Dario Floreano, Auke Ijspeert, Roland Siegwart, Stefano Mintchev, Kamilo Andres Melo Becerra, Davide Scaramuzza, Tomislav Horvat, Marco Hutter

Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly rel ...

2019

Essays on adaptation to rare disasters

Takafumi Usui

This thesis aims to further investigate rare natural disasters and studies adaptation decisions under uncertainty by solving several computational economic models. The modeling of rare natural disasters depends on the treatment of catastrophic outcomes wit ...

EPFL2019

Nonmodel-based framework for rapid seismic risk and loss assessment of instrumented steel buildings

Dimitrios Lignos, Seong-Hoon Hwang

This paper proposes a nonmodel-based framework for estimating story-based engineering demand parameters (EDPs) in instrumented steel frame buildings with steel moment-resisting frames (MRFs). The proposed framework utilizes a wavelet-based damage-sensitive ...

Elsevier2018

EaRL: Toolbox for Earthquake Risk and Loss Assessment of Building Assets

Dimitrios Lignos, Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed Elkady, Seong-Hoon Hwang

Infrastructure (asset) risk management is essential for a resilient environment. Several industries are concerned to improve their building asset preparedness subject to seismic hazard. To this end, the development of software tools that quantify and asses ...

2018

Combining Human Computing and Machine Learning to Make Sense of Big (Aerial) Data for Disaster Response

Stéphane Joost, Devis Tuia, Matthew Josef Parkan, Carlos Castillo, Muhammad Imran, Patrick Meier, Julien Briant

Aerial imagery captured via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is playing an increasingly important role in disaster response. Unlike satellite imagery, aerial imagery can be captured and processed within hours rather than days. In addition, the spatial resol ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2016

Bio-inspired balance controller for a humanoid robot

Auke Ijspeert, Renaud Ronsse, Nicolas Benoît Dominique Van der Noot, François André Heremans

Humanoid robots are gaining much interest nowadays. This is partly motivated by the ability of such robots to replace humans in dangerous environments being specifically designed for humans, such as man-made or natural disaster scenarios. However, existing ...

Ieee2016

Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones

Dario Floreano

We are witnessing the advent of a new era of robots — drones — that can autonomously fly in natural and man-made environments. These robots, often associated with defence applications, could have a major impact on civilian tasks, including transportation, ...

Nature Publishing Group2015

Automated Damage Index Estimation of Reinforced Concrete Columns for Post-Earthquake Evaluations

The safety of buildings which have been affected by a natural disaster such as an earthquake is currently evaluated manually by certified inspectors who identify visible damage on the structural elements. This process has been proven to be time-consuming, ...

American Society of Civil Engineers2015

Soft Pneumatic Actuators for Legged Locomotion

Jamie Paik, Juan Manuel Florez Marin, Yixin Bai, Benjamin Shih

Search and rescue robots are being used more frequently to access hazardous environments to assess situations and locate survivors. There are a wide range of existing mobile platforms for various situations and environments, but these robots are typically ...

2014

Learning from vernacular building practices: A starting point for risk mitigation

Milo Hofmann, Annalisa Caimi

In most natural disaster prone areas, vernacular builders have implemented affordable strategies that have proven to perform adequately during natural hazards. Learning from these practices represents a great potential to further strengthen the resilience ...

Crc Press-Taylor & Francis Group2014