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Panoramic view on the North Campus © Jürgen Huhn​/​TU Dortmund
PROF. WIETFELD COORDINATES LARUS RESEARCH ALLIANCE

Unmanned Aviation System for Use in Emergencies at Sea Successfully Tested

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A small plane flies over the sea. © DGzRS​/​TU Dortmund
The automatic fixed-wing aircraft has already safely traveled some 660 nautical miles over sea.
Together with nine partners, including TU Dortmund University, the German Maritime Search and Rescue Association (DGzRS) has successfully tested an unmanned aviation system over the Baltic Sea that can be employed in emergencies at sea. Launched three years ago, the research project LARUS – which is Latin for seagull – has culminated in an automatic fixed-wing aircraft that has already flown safely over some 660 sea miles (roughly 1,220 kilometers). In the future, a more developed version could improve communications and data exchange when coordinating search and rescue measures under severe operating conditions – and thus save lives. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research funded the program under the Research for Civil Security program.

“At sea, the actual rescue will still be carried out by people in rescue cruisers and helicopters. But, if they fly automatically, unmanned aviation systems can deliver additional communication capacity and immediate situation photos,” says DFzRS CEO Captain Udo Helge Fox, underlining the importance of the research.

For the first time, LARUS integrated an unmanned aviation system in a search and rescue scenario for people in distress at sea in German waters off the coast of Vorpommern, between Rügen and Usedom, that is, in the DFzRS’s area of competence. “The aim was to trace a dummy in the Baltic Sea. The LARUS demonstrator quickly found the object, transmitted the data to the rescue cruiser Berthold Beitz and the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center in Bremen, and guided the rescuers safely to the ‘shipwreck victims,’” reports DGzRS scientist and head of the project, Thomas Lübcke.

Real-time transmission of situation photos to users

The LARUS system has its own modified transponder for the standard maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS). This enables it to localize location transmitters that are integrated in modern life vests. Usually, the AIS signals can only be received within a small radius of the person in the water. The LARUS system can track them from the air and pass on the data to the rescue units that have not yet reached the scene.

As part of the LARUS project, an unmanned fixed-wing aircraft with a wingspan of 3.6 meters was developed to meet the demands of the sea rescue service. “Using the LARUS demonstrator we tested various components for optical and sensory tracking as well as novel concepts for reliable wireless networking. All the components transmit live information to the ground from where the safety of flight operations can be constantly monitored,” says the coordinator of the research alliance, Professor Christian Wietfeld, head of the Communication Networks Institute at TU Dortmund. “The point is to provide very efficient technology to support rescuers working under particularly difficult conditions.”

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