A New Wireless Micro-balloon Network for Disaster Use

There were serious damages in the northern part of Japan by the East Japan Great Earthquake on March 11, 2011. In order to quickly find and rescue the missing people and understand the disaster state in the damaged areas, it is required to widely monitor and quickly collect the information and images with disaster areas just after disaster. However, because of luck of power supply and communication network failure, it is very difficult to monitor the disaster area and transmit the image information to the headquarters. In this paper, we introduce a wireless ballooned monitoring system which is organized by high resolution omni-directional camera and wireless LAN to take images from the sky and sends them to the relay station on the ground. Thus, the images of wide areas in the disaster place ware monitored to quickly make decision for rescue on the disaster headquarter.