4 ms·

How well would sound work? As in listening for the person to yell out to an autonomous vehicle flying above the canopy. Obviously drones are noisy, so maybe fi

How well would sound work? As in listening for the person to yell out to an autonomous vehicle flying above the canopy. Obviously drones are noisy, so maybe fixed wing. Or maybe you could have a microphone suspended on a cable fifty feet below a quad, with an apparatus that shields noise from above. But there seem to be promising characteristics too for this situation: 1.) human voice is very different than propeller hum, 2.) wildernesses have very minimal background noise. Filter and classify outliers. I say this as someone whose only SAR situation was getting himself out of the Vermont woods at dusk by hiking roughly a mile towards the sound of a barking dog.

thaumaturgy 8y ago
People have discussed that. A flying thing that could be used to relay instructions to lost parties would be helpful in a few situations. I think search organizations are certainly interested in UAVs, but at the moment nobody's sure how to use them effectively. It kinda strikes me as being like blockchain: cool technology, everybody wants to use it, but there aren't really that many real-world use cases where something else isn't just as good or better. Probably the highest priority should be fixing their flight time. 25 minutes is just not enough time in the air to be useful, and fixed-wing is too tricky to navigate in too many kinds of terrain. If someone figures out how to start approaching 60 minutes in the air with a payload -- speaker & microphone, IR, comms -- that would probably start getting more attention. Another thing that would be really cool is an airborne minicell. Just about everyone's carrying a smartphone now, they're just going into areas where there's no signal. If something could go out there offering signal, and report back when a device tries to connect to it, it wouldn't necessarily need to get close to the ground and that could really narrow down some of our searches.

thaumaturgy 8y ago

People have discussed that. A flying thing that could be used to relay instructions to lost parties would be helpful in a few situations. I think search organizations are certainly interested in UAVs, but at the moment nobody's sure how to use them effectively. It kinda strikes me as being like blockchain: cool technology, everybody wants to use it, but there aren't really that many real-world use cases where something else isn't just as good or better. Probably the highest priority should be fixing their flight time. 25 minutes is just not enough time in the air to be useful, and fixed-wing is too tricky to navigate in too many kinds of terrain. If someone figures out how to start approaching 60 minutes in the air with a payload -- speaker & microphone, IR, comms -- that would probably start getting more attention. Another thing that would be really cool is an airborne minicell. Just about everyone's carrying a smartphone now, they're just going into areas where there's no signal. If something could go out there offering signal, and report back when a device tries to connect to it, it wouldn't necessarily need to get close to the ground and that could really narrow down some of our searches.