This article deals with the problem of victim localization in avalanches by using controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with an electromagnetic sensor (known as ARVA) typically adopted in these search and rescue scenarios. We show that the nominal ARVA measurement can be linearly related to a quantity that is sufficient to reconstruct the victim position. We explicitly deal with a robust scenario in which the measurement is actually perturbed by the noise that grows with the distance to the victim and propose an adaptive control scheme based on a least-square identifier and a trajectory generator whose role is both to guarantee the persistence of excitation for the identifier and to steer the ARVA receiver toward the victim. We prove that the controller ensures boundedness of trajectories and enables to localize the victim in a domain where the ARVA output is sufficiently informative. We illustrate its performance in a realistic simulation framework specifically developed with real data. The proposed approach could significantly reduce the searching time by providing an exploitable estimate before having reached the victim.

中文翻译：

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通过强大的观察者搜索雪崩受害者

本文通过使用配备电磁传感器（称为 ARVA）的受控无人机 (UAV) 来解决雪崩中的受害者定位问题，这些电磁传感器通常用于这些搜索和救援场景。我们表明标称 ARVA 测量可以与足以重建受害者位置的数量线性相关。我们明确地处理了一个健壮的场景，其中测量实际上受到随着到受害者的距离而增长的噪声的干扰，并提出了一种基于最小二乘标识符和轨迹生成器的自适应控制方案，其作用是保证持久性激发标识符并将 ARVA 接收器转向受害者。我们证明控制器确保了轨迹的有界性，并能够在 ARVA 输出足够信息的域中定位受害者。我们在一个专门用真实数据开发的真实模拟框架中说明了它的性能。所提出的方法可以通过在到达受害者之前提供可利用的估计来显着减少搜索时间。