Using tornado-related weather data to route unmanned aerial vehicles to locate damage and victims

This paper presents a framework for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cameras and wireless sensors to search an area after the occurrence of a tornado. This paper attempts to demonstrate how tornado weather data can be incorporated into search and rescue procedures to allocate and route the UAVs. Traditionally, the time to assess and search an area after a tornado strikes is on the order of several days. Incorporating UAVs into a search and rescue team’s available tools can reduce this time span to the order of hours. These methods are applied and model in this project to three real-world cases. Several methods for creating ”waypoints,” points of interest for the UAVs to inspect, to route the UAVs were tested. An analysis was performed to compare the time it took to generate the waypoints and the resulting objective function value. It is observed that while there is an opportunity to use exact methods to generate waypoints, our proposed heuristic is sufficient for the rapid response needed in post-disaster relief.