  Rescue vessels are the main actors in maritime safety and rescue operations.
At the same time, aerial drones bring a significant advantage into this
scenario. This paper presents the research directions of the AutoSOS project,
where we work in the development of an autonomous multi-robot search and rescue
assistance platform capable of sensor fusion and object detection in embedded
devices using novel lightweight AI models. The platform is meant to perform
reconnaissance missions for initial assessment of the environment using novel
adaptive deep learning algorithms that efficiently use the available sensors
and computational resources on drones and rescue vessel. When drones find
potential objects, they will send their sensor data to the vessel to verity the
findings with increased accuracy. The actual rescue and treatment operation are
left as the responsibility of the rescue personnel. The drones will
autonomously reconfigure their spatial distribution to enable multi-hop
communication, when a direct connection between a drone transmitting
information and the vessel is unavailable.
