Objective
The objective of the Quakebots project is to introduce and validate a novel technology and tools for disaster management during earthquakes, with the ambition of minimizing both direct and indirect damage during and after a seismic event, increasing people safety and helping in the assessment of post-seismic damage to critical infrastructures.
Recent news of disasters in central Italy, and southern Europe in general, demonstrated how earthquakes are one of the most harmful natural disasters, accountable for invaluable losses in terms of damage to critical infrastructures, cultural heritage and impairment of local transportation and energy distribution network. Unfortunately, the countries that are more exposed to seismic risk show also the highest percentage of building heritage older than 40 years, more than 75%, and ancient historical buildings, with no seismic aware design in place. In such countries, earthquakes are also accountable for countless death tolls.
Quake Engineering proposes a distributed sensor network that is capable of automatically detect the occurrence of primary waves during a seismic event, and acting as a distributed IoT P2P neural network, propagate an alert to all the other nodes in the network in cascade. This “signaling” wave propagates much faster than the harmful secondary waves, providing the users with a local acoustic and visual alert, giving them a small time frame in the magnitude of tens of seconds for taking safety critical actions.
The main purpose of the project is to carry an extensive demonstration of the effectiveness of the solution in a medium scale scenario, targeting the B2B and B2A markets as the most promising and eager early adopters. The project will also cover the incremental research and development effort for a rapid market uptake. It is foreseen that the system will be ready for the commercialization by 2019.
The successful introduction of Quakebots will generate up to 10M€ in revenues in a three year period.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternetinternet of things
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringstructural engineeringstructural health monitoring
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensorssmart sensors
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeologyseismology
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
00131 ROMA
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.