Capstone design · Hanyang University ERICA · 2020–2022

Help: an unmanned rescue-assist robot for people in the water

Built for marine accidents. It raises the alarm, finds people in the water with RGB and thermal cameras, and until rescuers arrive it reports their position and helps keep them warm.

Team: 6 students
Hardware: Jetson Nano, Raspberry Pi 4, LoRa
Stack: ROS, YOLOv5, TensorRT, Eigen, MariaDB
Recognition: Three awards, 2021–2022

CAD render of a red U-shaped robot hull with its electronics bay open — CAD render of the hull with the electronics bay open.

The idea

After a marine accident, people in the water have to be found and kept safe until a rescue team arrives. Help raises the alarm when an accident happens, heads toward people in the water, and keeps reporting where they are.

How it works

1 Detect the accident In normal operation the IMU tilt is compared with two thresholds. A large tilt sends a warning over LoRa; lying flat is treated as sinking and sends a rescue message with GPS position and time.
2 Find people The RGB camera gives bounding boxes; the thermal camera returns the center of a human-temperature region as the target. A Kalman filter tracks the target, and the left and right motors steer toward it.
3 Stay and report On reaching the person the robot makes an announcement and keeps sending its GPS position, which a server shows on a live map.

One robot

Raspberry Pi 4 Reads the IMU, GPS and a single-point radar, keeps the robot state, and sends it over LoRa.

Jetson Nano Vision. Runs detection on the RGB and thermal cameras and returns the target pixel when the Raspberry Pi asks.

Several robots

Robot n Robot n−1 … Robot 1 Receiver

Inside one robot, and how several robots relay their states along a LoRa chain, each adding its own before passing it on.

Recognition

2022Special Prize, National Capstone Design Competition

2021Silver Award, Creative Engineering Design Competition

2021Grand Prize, CARE Innovation Idea Contest (GIG-Education Program)

2021Selected as a representative entry, capstone design exhibition of the Engineering Education Innovation Center

My part

On a team of six I worked on the system design, motor control, the data server, communication, sensor control, the algorithms and the electrical system.