First response gearWearable map-creating device to help first responders
A wearable sensor system automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving; the system is envisioned as a tool to help emergency responders coordinate disaster response
A prototype sensor array that can be worn on the chest automatically maps the wearer’s environment, recognizing movement between floors.
MIT researchers have built a wearable sensor system which automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving. The prototype system, described in a paper slated for the Intelligent Robots and Systems conference in Portugal next month, is envisioned as a tool to help emergency responders coordinate disaster response.
An MIT release reports that in experiments conducted on the MIT campus, a graduate student wearing the sensor system wandered the halls, and the sensors wirelessly relayed data to a laptop in a distant conference room.
Observers in the conference room were able to track the student’s progress on a map that sprang into being as he moved.
Connected to the array of sensors is a handheld pushbutton device that the wearer can use to annotate the map. In the prototype system, depressing the button simply designates a particular location as a point of interest. The researchers, however, envision that emergency responders could use a similar system to add voice or text tags to the map — indicating, say, structural damage or a toxic spill.
“The operational scenario that was envisioned for this was a hazmat situation where people are suited up with the full suit, and they go in and explore an environment,” says Maurice Fallon, a research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and lead author on the new paper. “The current approach would be to textually summarize what they had seen afterward — ‘I went into this room on the left, I saw this, I went into the next room,’ and so on. We want to try to automate that.”
Fallon is joined on the paper by professors John Leonard and Seth Teller, of, respectively, the departments of Mechanical Engineering and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and EECS grad students Hordur Johannsson and Jonathan Brookshire.
Shaky aim
The release notes that the new work builds on previous research on systems that enable robots to map their environments.
Adapting the system so that a human could wear it, however, required a number of modifications.
One of the sensors that the system uses is a laser rangefinder, which sweeps a laser beam around a 270-degree arc and measures the time that it takes the light pulses to return. If the rangefinder is level, it
