Alaa Alhowaide

Search and rescue (SAR) missions in collapsed or underground environments remain challenging due to GPS unavailability, which hinders localization and autonomous navigation. Systems that rely on single-sensor inputs or structured settings often degrade under smoke, dust, or dynamic clutter. This paper presents an autonomous ground robot for GPS-denied SAR that integrates low-cost thermal, visual, inertial, and acoustic cues within a unified, computation-efficient architecture. The stack combines Thermal–Visual Odometry (TV–VO) with Zero-Velocity Updates (ZUPT) for drift-resistant localization, RescueGraph for multimodal survivor detection, and a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) planner for adaptive navigation under uncertainty. Across simulated disaster scenarios and benchmark corridor runs, the system shows embedded-feasible runtime behavior and supports return to base without external beacons under the evaluated conditions. Quantitatively, TV–VO+ZUPT reduces drift in short internal evaluations, while RescueGraph attains an F1-score of 0.6923 and an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.976 for survivor detection. At the system level, the integrated navigation stack achieves full mission completion in the reported SAR-style trials, while the separate A*/PPO comparison highlights a trade-off between completion rate, traversal time, and collisions. Overall, the results support the practical promise of a low-cost sensor-fusion and learning-assisted navigation framework for GPS-denied SAR robotics.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow, cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common. The security of IoT networks relies heavily on intrusion detection systems (IDSs). The development of an IDS that is accurate and efficient is a challenging task. As a result, this challenge is made more challenging by the absence of balanced datasets for training and testing the proposed IDS. In this study, four commonly used datasets are visualized and analyzed visually. Moreover, it proposes a sampling algorithm that generates a sample that represents the original dataset. In addition, it proposes an algorithm to generate a balanced dataset. Researchers can use this paper as a starting point when investigating cybersecurity and machine learning. The proposed sampling algorithms showed reliability in generating well-representing and balanced samples from NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, BotNetIoT-01, and BoTIoT datasets.