Abstract
Aim: The main goal of the paper is to present a dedicated to water rescue speedboat (RIB type) adapted to conducting search at night or in low visibility conditions, as well as, a video-coordination system supporting rescue actions.
Introduction: The video-coordination system integrated with a speedboat for a night search was developed within the research project No. UDA-POIG.01.04.00-22-008/11-00. All presented results were tested in real conditions by specialist practitioners. What is more, presented solutions correspond with the priority directions of scientific and technological research areas associated with the improvement of public safety at night.
Results: A technology presented by the authors is a speedboat dedicated to night exploration (search), integrated with video-coordination system for water rescue. The paper describes the results of the project, aimed at introducing construction changes to a speedboat. These adapted the boat to search and rescue actions realised at night. The speedboat is also equipped with a video system supporting water rescue. To concentrate on the problems related to the planning of night actions on the inland waters, the algorithms of components of the implementation process of search and rescue actions were presented. Particular attention was paid to visualization of the situation in the area of exploration and the importance of the access to the environmental data. Presented network-centric charts were made in GIS technology which allowed to visualize in the form of layers current and forecasted hydrological and meteorological conditions. The paper showed a proposal of coordinating network-centric charts with the information and organizational support, thus allowing to improve the precision of the boat localisation and simultaneous visualisation of its position on the map. Inland water areas are small and, therefore, downloading hydrometeorological data from web services should be interactive. System has to adapt the data to the operational situation. An example of how important the calculation step is has been shown on the area of the Gulf of Gdansk, adjacent to the harbour of Gdynia with the docks depicted in steps of 1 nautical mile and in 0.1 nautical mile.
Conclusions: The authors presented planning methods of rescue research on water areas at night. The current planning system is enhanced with electronic maps combined with environmental data downloaded automatically from websites. While the accuracy of positioning seeking entities is enhanced, the effectiveness of taken actions is also better. The developed network-centric platform can also be used for simulation of search and rescue operations.
Keywords: water rescue, Geographic Information System, network centric warfare, RIB, surface search, electronic map
Type of article: original scientific article