Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AIOSAT (Autonomous Indoor Outdoor SafetyTracking system) Reporting period: 2019-03-01 to 2020-12-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project 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. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far The AIOSAT complete system is a tracking and alert system for firefighters and security people involved in an emergency. It locate and manage the person deployed in the intervention in indoor and outdoor scenarios by brigades, with one brigade leader and several firefighters under his command.It is composed of one node per person, 1 communication gateway per brigade, 1 tablet per brigade for the mobile application and 1 ICP application for the command post. The nodes have EGNSS, IMU Pedestrian Dear Reckoning and UWB inter-distance sensor with no fixed infrastructure deployed for them. This system is completed with a very innovative fusion algorithm for the estimation of the position of every node with no need to know the buildings in advance.The Brigade leader can track the first responders at his command and receive alerts and monitoring data from every one of them into his mobile application in order to decide which is the best and safest move to do. The same information is received in the Incident Command Post for all the brigades. The location of every person has a good precision in indoor or outdoor scenarios due to the innovative fusion with no installed infrastructure. This information and the alerts generated are transferred into a mobile and visual application for the brigade leader and into the Incident Command Post application by configurable communication systems (network and or point to point solutions). In exchange, the command can complete this information with external data and propose safer and more efficient steps for the positive conclusion of the intervention.The whole intervention is recorded into both application and could be replayed to analyse the steps and to improve the team procedure and reactions.One of the best points of this system is that the deployment time is very fast, as it only needs a LORA gateway installed on the ground or already installed in the truck for the indoor case.Moreover, the technologies are we known and stable, so the system is cost efficient.The deliverables with final subsystem and system results are D3.2 D4.2 D5.1 D5.2 D6.2 and D6.3. For the IPR, standardization and business plan D1.11 D7.5 and D7.6 have been delivered, respectively. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) The work carried out towards the critical objectives is explained in the next paragraphs. That shows the progress beyond the state of the art in terms of system and result.1. Enable a high availability and high integrity team positioning and tracking system based on GNSS, EGNOS and fusion of IMU, RF-ranging and map data, able to work inside buildings and rural areas:The system and subsystems requirements have been set based on the user needs. Then, we have developed the first versions of the subsystems and of the processing algorithms to obtain the data needed for the fusion algorithm, which is one of the key of the system and a remarkable progress beyond the state of the art as it improves the continuity and availability. The improvement on the integrity function is fused with the support of the external augmentation system. 2. Develop a set of tracking and alerting application protocols for fire services which radically improve responder safety by reducing life and health risks during fire suppression operations within structures and forest environments:First, the end-users have been key to decide which are the operational rules and assumptions for tracking and alerting the firefighters during an intervention. One of the main points was to be sure that AIOSAT system will be completely interoperable with the nowadays procedures. For this point, the progress beyond the state of the art is the work of concentrating the user needs from several inputs from different countries into a common document. Also, the deduction of the system and subsystems requirements from these user needs is something valuable for the end users. Then, with the position and other valuable data from every node, the alerting algorithms have been started. The first implementation has been into the subofficer portable app.3. Reduce the impact of fires on health, environment and economy by enabling improved fire suppression operations founded on increased safety trust of firefighters and fire chiefs:This objective is the most generic one in terms of technical activity and will be fairly judged at the end of the project and afterwards. However, this is one of the main points that is taken into account for the design of the overall system. From one side, the architecture and the communications of the system is doubled, with diversity of technologies, to increase the reliability on the data transmission. From the other side, all the data of every intervention are logged and could be reproduced on the subofficer application to analyse what happened and what could be improved. Our aim is to make the firefighters feel safer and even better on what they already master. AIOSAT system components and functionalities
