Crowdsourcing with OpenRelief

These days, when you think of drones, you probably think of assassinations and police surveillance. However, the OpenRelief project is developing a more humanitarian role for robot airplanes – gathering information to aid disaster relief. Using free software and off-the-shelf components, the project is well on its way to providing an effective toolkit at a fraction of the price of equivalent proprietary solutions.

OpenRelief came about when Shane Coughlan, the former Legal Coordinator for Free Software Foundation Europe, became involved in the post-tsunami recovery in Japan in March 2011...The drones being developed by OpenRelief are about a meter and a half long and can be launched from a very limited space – “from a footpath” is the description that Coughlan uses in a video on the project website. The drones carry sensors, whose readings are relayed back to Mission Control software, and can be re-programmed during flight. The result is a quick and safe way to gather information about the often-changing conditions in disaster areas.

The first prototypes use the Ardupilot Mega autopilot, as well as its firmware and Mission Control software, with a Raspberry Pi main controller. The visual recognition software is OpenCV running on Linux. To this list of off-the-shelf components, OpenRelief is adding a ground-based radiation detector. According to Coughlan, this first detector will be the prototype for the development of other sensors. The hope is that others will contribute their own sensors, but OpenRelief itself will eventually develop an airborne sensor to add to the drones’ monitoring capacity...