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There are many reasons why a life jacket cannon is a terrible idea. How do you get perfect accuracy ? People that are drowning can’t swim anymore in many cases,
by sailingparrot 2y ago
There are many reasons why a life jacket cannon is a terrible idea. How do you get perfect accuracy ? People that are drowning can’t swim anymore in many cases, they barely have energy to stay on the surface. So you can’t be off by 10 meters.
They also won’t have the energy to put the life jacket while already in the water. And while life jackets properly equipped around your torso make you float correctly, barely resting your arms on a life jacket is not terribly buoyant.
You need to account for wind, not just to aim, but also because the life jacket will drift away. And as it happens strong winds are responsible for rip currents and waves which is very often what causes drownings in the first place, so wind is the default environment, not an edge case.
Waves and surface currents have a strong chance of carrying away the jacket before the drowning person can get to it.
A system that can be course corrected to account for all of those parameters seem the best, its rigid, so will provide buoyancy even when just holding on the device, it’s also big enough to support more than one person, many drowning events involve more than one person (often someone that was initially trying to help end up getting themselves in trouble).
- aftbit 2y agoHow about a flying drone that drops an inflatable from a few meters above the struggling swimmer?
- itishappy 2y agoHow about using a cheap floating platform? One with a more efficient operating mode, larger payload capacity, less moving parts, safe failure modes...
- Spivak 2y agoHonestly the drone probably wins in all those categories today and the drone doesn't have the problem of needing to navigate choppy water, has a bird's eye view, and can't accidentally slam into the swimmer on a bad wave. And you can buy them off the shelf, hell you can buy a drone right now today that can physically lift the person out of the ocean.
- akadruid1 2y agoThese exist and have been saving lives for at least 6 years: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/lifeguard-drone-rescue-australia-spd https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/lifegua...
- brewdad 2y agoCosts 20x as much as this robot. It does have the advantage of being used successfully once.
- aftbit 2y agoThe drone used in that situation is the "Little Ripper Lifesaver" which supposedly sells for around $50k[1]. From TFA, the cost for the boat was around $12k. That means this is about 4x more expensive, not 20x. That doesn't include the droppable inflatable boat but that is probably not going to break the bank either. 1: https://www.insidehook.com/culture/little-ripper-rescue-drone-australia-lifeguard-saves-lives https://www.insidehook.com/culture/little-ripper-rescue-dron...
- exe34 2y agoknowing my luck, they would hit their aim perfectly, and I'd be knocked out.