Visually Intelligent Tactical Agent for Locating Survivors

Discipline: Interdisciplinary

Advisor: Rick Leinecker

Search and Rescue operations in remote or hazardous terrain are often hindered by limited visibility, human fatigue, and the slow pace of manual ground searches. Current drone solutions frequently rely on direct manual piloting, which lacks the scalability and cognitive speed required for rapid life-saving interventions. VITALS (Visually Intelligent Tactical Agent for Locating Survivors) is an autonomous, multi-agent drone swarm system designed to revolutionize SAR operations. It utilizes a containerized AI architecture featuring real-time detection and LLaVA for semantic visual reasoning to identify survivors and landmarks from high-altitude video feeds. Unlike standard drones, VITALS provides "context-aware" intelligence. It doesn't just detect a "human" it understands descriptions like "a hiker in a red jacket near a creek." By utilizing a local Llama 3 LLM and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the system maintains a persistent mission memory to synthesize strategic flight intents. These intents are translated into MAVLink commands for autonomous execution, drastically reducing operator cognitive load. VITALS offers a scalable, cost-effective tool for emergency agencies to localize survivors and save lives when every second counts.

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