Designing a Mobile Robot for Rescue Assist and Military Operations: Real Time Computer Vision System, People Detection using Thermal Camera, and Navigation Programming

In this project, it was required to design a robot that can go to dangerous places to search for trapped or injured people and locate their locations. In the disaster areas, it might be difficult or dangerous for the rescue team to search for people in the remaining of a destroyed building. Moreover, in war, it is better to send a robot to search for injured or unconscious solders in the enemy areas. The robot has been built with a tank style platform and has laser, sonar and infrared sensors for navigation and obstacle avoidance. Three control modes have been designed to control the movement of the robot. The first and second modes are to move the robot manually to explore unknown places and when pressing the home button, the robot should return to the home position. The third mode is to let the robot explore a building autonomously and return back to home position. The commands are sent by a remote computer. Hardware of computer vision has been designed and it consists of two cameras which are thermal and colour cameras. Then, an algorithm has been designed to detect people in different scenarios.

Laith A. H. Al-Shimaysawee was born in Najaf-Iraq on 22/03/1988. Al-Shimaysawee awarded a BSc deg. in Electrical Eng. from the University of Kufa, and a MSc deg. in Electronic Eng. from Flinders University, Australia. He has been lecturing at University of Kufa since 2011. His research interests are in the field of robot vision and localization.