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Fleets of drones could aid searches for lost hikers
- chmaynard 8y agoInteresting, useful research. I didn't know that GPS is unreliable under a forest canopy. Hmm, I wonder if hikers could aid searches for lost drones?
- sitkack 8y ago"Lost hikers" is really enemy combatant.
- vorpalhex 8y agoI'd imagine an enemy combatant would be using camouflage unlike a a lost hiker who would want to be found.
- village-idiot 8y agoHikers typically wear the exact opposite of camouflage. Edit: really? Downvotes? Hiker gear is half neon colors and colored in reflective tabs. Easy visibility for SAR purposes is a design criteria for most hiking gear.
- gaius 8y agoHikers typically wear the exact opposite of camouflage Photographers, hunters and people who's taste in clothes doesn't run to the garish?
- village-idiot 8y agoHunter’s orange is pretty damn bright by design. I would also argue that hunter != hiker. I’ve never noticed a correlation between photographers and clothing colors. I tend not to be in my own photos, so it’s not something I select gear based on. Obviously not every bag is bright, although my wife’s bag is a nice metallic teal, but every hiking bag I’ve ever seen has reflector tabs built in. Ditto with our tent and rain flies, and quite a few of our tops. They help in a SAR situation, and improve safety if you ever need to come close to a road at night. Taste is subjective, but outdoor gear trends towards the bright for safety reasons. I have never seen a hiker wear camo, all of them have reflector tabs, and a large percentage have tops, bags, and hats in bright colors. And that’s not even getting into inclement weather gear, which trends towards the super garish. There’s a reason why Everest has a “rainbow valley”, and it’s not because heavy coats are designed to be subtle.
- jpindar 8y agoThat sounds like a "no true Scotsman" argument.
- village-idiot 8y agoNo. I pointed out that hunting isn’t hiking (opinion, but they do have different names), and that regardless hunters regularly wear gear that is anti-camouflage by design, making any distinction there moot. I then proceeded to point out that hiking gear has reflective tabs and bright colors for similar reasons. The more extreme the gear, the more intense the visibility features on average. I then made an observation about what I’ve seen. At no point did I say that any of those groups aren’t “real” hikers. Therefore, not a true Scotsman argument.
- vorpalhex 8y agoTo bolster your point, even if my clothes are drab, I probably have a brightly colored buff or bandana on me intentionally if only to be easier to spot through the woods by fellow hikers. Likewise a fair bit of my gear is in flavors of "rescue orange".
- diego 8y agoThese drones can have any sensor you want. IR, motion detection, radio signals, you name it. Hiding from AI equipped with the right sensors is very hard. The only advantage you have is that you can hear them coming. For now anyway.
- vernie 8y agoA hyperspectral camera would make spotting those pesky hikers a breeze.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoNope, they just have to be military age or indeterminate age males.
- trustfundbaby 8y agoSo what do we do, not develop the technology because some people could use it for evil? like .. umm ... everything else on earth?
- Someone1234 8y agoOn a related note, sea search & rescue still primarily relies on spotters looking out the windows trying to see something. Seems like a place where pattern recognition could be an asset, even if it just supplements rather than replaces a spotter. Or heck, send a Google Maps-style image to land, and let volunteers flag points of interest.
- jcrawfordor 8y agoThere's a couple of different services that are taking a "Mechanical Turk" approach to this problem right now. Probably the largest is Tomnod, which has had volunteers classify objects in satellite images for both SAR and humanitarian tasks: https://www.tomnod.com/ https://www.tomnod.com/
- bicubic 8y agoThe tech required for search and rescue is the same tech required for search and destroy. We seem to be running headfirst into the autonomous killer bot future without giving so much as a second look at the implications. Slaughterbots [0] is a pretty good look at what can be achieved by refining and integrating technologies which all exist today. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
- jbob2000 8y agoYou can attach weapons and AI to anything, it’s not a reason to stop progress. Morality has kept nuclear weapons in check (so far anyways), I’m sure it will keep AI drones in check too.
- nordsieck 8y ago> Morality has kept nuclear weapons in check (so far anyways) Morality and logistics. The major nuclear powers have implemented a relatively successful program to make it very difficult for a non-nuclear power to develop nuclear weapons. > I’m sure it will keep AI drones in check too. There is simply no way to use logistics to curtail AI drones in the same manner as nuclear weapons; all that is needed to make a drone is a 3d printer, common industrial components and software.
- winchling 8y agoYes the main way to keep drones in check is to develop anti-drone drones. Just as the way to keep biological weapons in check is to develop biological cures and antidotes i.e. staying several steps ahead of the bad guys but without creating offensive weapons per se.
- njarboe 8y agoFortunately for an AI drone swarm to be as destructive as a decent sized nuke, you would need millions of them. Unfortunately an AI drone swarm can be less destructive than a nuke. It could kill all the people in a city but leave infrastructure completely intact for the attackers to use. This future is not here yet but is coming and it is good people are starting to talk about it.
- zython 8y agoYeah, nah. Its only a matter of time when "find and rescue" becomes "search and destroy". Not to cheapen the work the authors have done, but I dont have a lot of faith that this tech will be used for "good".
- hprotagonist 8y agoI will thank you very kindly to take your loud battery powered flying fire-starters out of federal wilderness areas, thanks. SAR is hard enough as it is. Also, and this may sound just totally perverse, when i go into a wilderness area I really do want to be alone and out of range of the world.
- lolc 8y agoMaybe you are an exception but once they're in a survival situation most people would welcome any means to be found.
- chrisfosterelli 8y agoI don't follow why the drones need to go below the canopy at all. Just use an infrared camera! This is already being done in our local area for SAR, though with remote controlled drones rather than autonomous[0], and it's worked. I also worked on a undergrad research project involving autonomously deployed drones that identified cattle with infrared and the results were a no-brainer compared to conventional cameras[1], even though this was quite a few years ago and both autonomous navigation and infrared options have gotten much much better since then. There's the problem of false positives for sure (e.g. deer), but it gives you more than enough starting points. This research sounds genuinely really fascinating, and I think they are making huge progress on a difficult problem (specifically, navigating unknown 3D space). I'm just not sure that this use case is the most important one. [0]: https://www.radionl.com/2018/03/11/3624/ https://www.radionl.com/2018/03/11/3624/ [1]: https://fosterelli.co/file/talk/tracking-cattle-with-infrared-imaging.pdf https://fosterelli.co/file/talk/tracking-cattle-with-infrare...
- thaumaturgy 8y agoI'd love to hear more about cases in which IR has made a difference in a search, because that hasn't been my experience or what I've heard about it. And I'm calling BS on IR being able to see footprints under fresh snow, unless that fresh snow is a light dusting about 1 cm thick -- which just about any tracker could follow anyway. IR requires a steep difference in thermal gradients between the subject and the environment. In cold environments, subjects tend to wear insulating clothing (and if they've shed that, then they've gone into the paradoxical undressing stage of hypothermia, and unfortunately they're done for). The cold environment also acts as a massive heat sink, quickly masking any heat signatures. Warm environments suffer from reflectivity. Rocks bake in the sunlight and then re-emit that radiation all night long. There are some environments where IR might help, but many more where it doesn't.
- chrisfosterelli 8y agoI don't know much personally about SAR applications. But in terms of the projects I've done, the temperature and size of the target is fairly predictable compared to noise in the image. While it's not as easy as "filter anything above this temperature as a positive", it's an easier engineering program than 3D navigation. > I'd love to hear more about cases in which IR has made a difference in a search, because that hasn't been my experience or what I've heard about it. Here's another link where IR was used to find seven missing people, same trial program: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/a-b-c-first-heat-seeking-drone-used-in-search-and-rescue-mission-1.3295797 https://bc.ctvnews.ca/a-b-c-first-heat-seeking-drone-used-in... While looking more into this though, they mentioned that one of the things the program found is that the drones are not good at seeing through tree canopies. This is surprising for me, and I suppose answers my question about why this MIT project has some benefit! I stand corrected in that regard. > There are some environments where IR might help, but many more where it doesn't. Absolutely. There's no magic solution for finding people. The project here is going to have pros and cons too, you need experienced people to know what tool makes sense where.
- dmckeon 8y agoI would think that IR sensors would be a natural choice, more for ‘lost child’ or ‘injured hiker’ than for the simpler ‘lost hiker’ scenario. One of the SAR challenges for lost children is that they might too frightened to leap up and wave their arms at searchers, either human or robotic. Calling a lost child by name helps, but IR seems like a natural choice - is there a weight, battery, or cost downside?
- thaumaturgy 8y agoEh, the bigger problem with lost children is their habit of hiding or wandering back into cleared areas. Fortunately, they don't tend to wander far. Lost Person Behavior guidebook puts a 4-6 year old child at a 95% range of 5.1 miles in dry territory. That doesn't change dramatically until you start approaching teenage ages. I've posted a few criticisms of IR already in this thread. There are a narrow range of environments where it's helpful, and there's a tradeoff between image quality and flight time -- you can have good flight time and terrible image quality, or good image quality and terrible flight time.
- nateberkopec 8y agoThe video assumes that the most important and most difficult part of a SAR drone's job - object detection - will simply be solved at some point in the future. I am a SAR volunteer, and our team has used drones on real searches. What I can tell you is that the problem is not navigation (even through forested areas), but object detection. Even for a human being, detecting humans (responsive or unresponsive) or signs of human presence (trash, abandoned camps, etc) from drone camera footage is extremely difficult. Autonomous flying drone navigation is hard but identifying signs of human presence from onboard sensor information will be much, much harder.
- BurningFrog 8y agoMy takeaway is that if I'm ever lost in the wild I need to make something VISIBLE.
- toss1 8y agoSeveral have commented on the likelihood that this will not be so much "Search & Rescue" as "Search & Destroy". It seems that the "no GPS required" spec and the under-the-canopy flying and mapping they showed makes this considerably more likely. Small drones on rescue missions need to find the lost person, identify their location and transmit it back. The search/find part would be best done above the canopy with appropriate sensors, covering as much ground as quickly as possible. Flying under the canopy, and mapping it the whole way would dramatically slow this process -- probably quicker to have a human horde search on foot. Once found, the GPS coordinates would be the most essential data point to transmit back to the rescuers. The relative positions of all the local trees would be kind of irrelevant, but that could be quite useful in targeting various kinds of attack. IOW, it seems the other Search & Destroy comments have got it right.
- lwansbrough 8y agoLots of drone people, so I’ll drop my off topic drone question: why isn’t gasoline more popular in the drone world? Isn’t the energy to weight ratio like 100x compared to LiPo?
- decebalus1 8y agoNot necessarily a drone person but I assume it's because a gas engine would have more moving parts hence more size and weight. There are drones running on gas but they're huge, not to mention loud.
- colordrops 8y agoLiPo has crossed the threshold into usefulness and electric storage will only get better.
- Wingman4l7 8y agoSeveral teams, including the winning one in previous years, used gasoline for the UAV Outback Challenge, an annual UAV search-and-rescue competition: https://uavchallenge.org/ https://uavchallenge.org/
- snovv_crash 8y ago1) noisy, messy, complicated and less reliable (no redundancy) 2) minimum size before it becomes a viable strategy 3) vibrations affect any cameras, requiring extra damping
- lexxed 8y agoprometheus did this in 2012
- rstuart4133 8y agoThere is a contest run in Australia called the "UAV Outback rescue" https://uavchallenge.org/ https://uavchallenge.org/ It's run by Australia's peak scientific body, the CSIRO so the results are pretty rigorous. The scenario is Joe is lost and incapacitated in the Australian bush. "Joe" is a human sized dummy with a (very) small infra red source under his clothing. He needs to be found and then have something done. He is located within an area of about 50 sq km. The requirement has always been the aircraft must be totally autonomous from take-off through to landing - and that includes finding Joe. In the previous challenge, once Joe was fond the aircraft had to land beside him, and take off again - in an area it had never seen before. About 6 years ago Andrew Tridgell (original author of Samba and Rsync) joined Canberra UAV (an amateur group of UAV enthusiasts), and started working on the Ardupilot AUV software Canberra UAV used in future attempts at the competition. At the time nobody had completed the challenge. After Andrew joined Canberra UAV, Canberra UAV completed the challenge every time (and indeed until 2018 was the only team to complete it) forcing the CSIRO to up the difficulty for the next competition to be held. The location algorithm has been pretty simple in all cases - this is a group of amateurs who could not use expensive LIDAR's. From memory it's multi pass. The first pass happens from relatively high, and then promising signatures (which are barely more than a pixel) and then investigated more closely.