Automatic search of missing people in avalanches

One of the main source of danger for people practising activities in mountain environments is avalanches. In the early 70s has been commercialized the first model of avalanche beacon transceiver: a device, composed by a transmitter and a receiver, specialized to the purpose of finding people buried under the snow. Since 2013, project SHERPA is working to develop ground and aerial robots to support human in the search of missing people in avalanches. The aim of this dissertation is to provide a way to interface an avalanche beacon receiver (ARTVA) with the autopilot module mounted on a quad-copter drone, and to study and realize a software implementation of two automatic search algorithms, with the intention of speeding up search operations with drones. First we will focus on interfacing the ARTVA system with a quad-copter autopilot module, named Pixhawk. This module embed a software, named PX4, which runs on a real-time operating system (RTOS), and have several connection ports, among which there is the serial one that we will use for our purpose. Then we will analyse how to use the data coming from the ARTVA receiver to construct and implement the two search algorithms. The idea is to generate set-points, based on the information coming from the avalanche beacon receiver, and use them to feed the position controller which is implemented in the PX4 firmware. Finally, we will execute simulations, provide results, and investigate if a practical implementation is possible and what are the relative issues.