The European population experiences yearly about 2 million to 2.5 million fires with 20 to 25 thousand deaths and 250 to 500 thousand reported injuries. Even though satellite-based positioning technology allows rescue workers to already operate efficiently, GNSS availability, reliability, and accuracy are often poor during fire operations, for example due to thick smoke, dense forests, rough terrain and inside buildings. As such, location information quite often needs to be augmented by tedious manual observations from firefighters who are already busy executing their stressful firefighting and rescue tasks.
“When firefighters can work safer and more efficiently, they can also save more lives”. 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. AIOSAT will build on the results of successful preceding projects and will focus on the evolution of European GNSS, such as Galileo and EGNOS, positioning, wireless communications, and tracking and alerting (TA) for emergency workers during fire rescue operations.
The key AIOSAT innovation targets are the research and integration of
Augmented GNSS positioning supported by differential corrections on the code to assure a trustful positioning estimation for safety critical applications, additionally with IMU, RF fusion and map information to obtain high-availability and accurate positioning,
A high availability communication system based on a robust long range radio link to send the differential code corrections and the status data, and
An efficient TA backend enabling the brigades and mission commanders to track the location of the safety workers during a mission and alert firefighters, in order to minimize the risk of accidents and increase the mission success.
