The PI and dual-degree PhD student João Falcão participated with the team led by co-PI Bob Iannucci at the Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) events, promoted by US Naval Postgraduate School at Camp Roberts, CA in November 2016. Following a ethics and IRB clearance process, they conducted trials with 6 volunteer military personnel in drills aimed at testing and further develop the integration of VR technology with emergency communication systems developed by CMU-SV project “CrossMobile” and the UAV intelligent system experiment led by co-PI Bob Iannucci. Together they explored a concept of “instrumented emergency search&rescue scenario” targeted for raise rescuer security and explore implicit communication between man and autonomous vehicles such as “follow-me drones” or “sidekick robots”. This concept line of R&D was part of the PI 4 months faculty exchange at CMU-SV and will be pursued during the remaining of the project.

An example of the obtained integration is shown in the figure below. Two voluntaries’ ECG and other vitals’ data are integrated with drone position and video footage, showing the feasibility of the integration of physiology and UAV position and imaging.