ABSTRACT
A pandemic like COVID-19 has conveyed the necessity of maintaining social distancing between two or more human beings. However, it is not possible for police or government officials to be omnipresent and regulate gatherings all around. This paper presents a model for maintaining social distancing norms using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) which helps in aerial surveillance and detecting humans using Hierarchical Extreme Learning Machine(HELM), estimating their geolocations, and calculating the distance between two immediate beings and alerting them in case they are in close proximity with another body using on-board systems and algorithms. The human being is alerted through a prerecorded audio clip played through a speaker present on the UAV to maintain necessary distance. Furthermore, the use-case is expanded for surveillance and crowd control measures by alerting the local authorities in case of a mass gathering in a region. This approach minimizes the deployment of personnel for ensuring and monitoring social distancing and helps regulate crowd gatherings using cyber-physical systems. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.