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Homemade AI drone software finds people when search and rescue teams can't
- isx726552 2y agoPut weapons on it (as already seen in current conflicts) and it becomes a seek-and-assassinate tool. Drones are cheap enough it could even be done en masse. It is a scary future, and it’s not far away at all.
- _njyk 2y agoIt exists in Estonia ("thanks" to Googley Eric Schmidt!), it's a company that had codename White Stork.
- avibhu 2y agoIronic name.
- hiddencost 2y agoNational bird of Ukraine
- ants_everywhere 2y agoIt looks like they may have changed their name. White Stork is the name of a charity that provides first aid kits and other aid in Ukraine. https://whitestork.us/ https://whitestork.us/ https://x.com/WilliamMcNulty/status/1798855191858712929 https://x.com/WilliamMcNulty/status/1798855191858712929
- jvanderbot 2y agoS&R has always been a front for weaponized robotics, IMHO. The last DARPA grand challenge (Subterrainean) had automated drone networks that could find and identify humans in caves and tunnels. They were at least up front about the military challenges in these environments. (https://www.darpa.mil/program/darpa-subterranean-challenge https://www.darpa.mil/program/darpa-subterranean-challenge), but the nod at civilian first-responders doesn't seem fair. Honestly, is cave-in such a big civilian problem that we need to prioritize it as a talking point at all levels?
- shadowgovt 2y agoIt's generally hard to say what's a "front" for what, unless you mean "what can you get someone to grant you research money for when you really expect to parlay the learnings into another topic." Everything about the rocketry needed to get to orbit started from warfare purposes, for example. And ARPANET was a foray into how to build a disruption-resistant network for military purposes. Science and knowledge are a bit of a soup.
- cpgxiii 2y ago> Honestly, is cave-in such a big civilian problem that we need to prioritize it as a talking point at all levels? Considering (1) the number of people who are employed in mining occupations, (2) the frequency of serious accidents in mines, yes. Particularly in developed countries, societies expect that great lengths will be gone to rescue or recover the victims, and mine rescue is incredibly dangerous work. (1) BLS says ~200K in the US in 2024, although only a minority of them work underground. (2) BLS says "underground mining machine operators" is the 9th deadliest job in the US, and that is with a large and well-equipped mine rescue system (MSRA says 250 teams across the country).
- jvanderbot 2y agoAre the other 8 BLS most dangerous professions being heavily automated and augmented with robots? Roofers, fishing and hunting workers, construction "helpers", etc? There's a case to be made that some of them are, I guess.
- cpgxiii 2y agoMining is heavily mechanized and automated already, yet remains inescapably dangerous. Pragmatically speaking, when someone falls off a roof or a tree, it doesn't turn into a highly public, high-risk, government-responsibility rescue mission. When someone gets trapped in a mine, it does. (If you fall off a tree logging in Alaska, there is a good chance a USCG helicopter crew comes to your aid, but that is more of a "five minutes in the local news" story than "nightly news host reporting live on location" event.)
- looofooo0 2y agoGuess what happens in Ukraine.
- morkalork 2y agoThe future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed
- ColinWright 2y agohttps://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson
- yieldcrv 2y agoI've been saying that any armistace on drones won't come until the US starts being hit by drone warfare. Especially by a foreign militia or nation state
- colechristensen 2y agoWhat do you think UFOs are?
- yieldcrv 2y agothey need to cause collateral damage, not busy work for FOIA respondents in Ohio
- idunnoman1222 2y agoThe US is the biggest user of drones. What are you talking about?
- hooverd 2y agoUS civilians aren't subjected to them though.
- shadowgovt 2y agoPrecisely. It's about terror. The US having the political capital it does (among other things, being a Security Council member in the UN), Americans won't push their government to curtail drone use until and unless they're on the receiving end of asymmetric warfare attacks perpetrated with low-cost disposables carrying lethal payloads. (Certainly not advocating for this, but noting that it's the most likely trigger to get the ball rolling on regulation of drones in military operation where very little currently exists).
- m4rtink 2y agoI would not be so sure - a mind boggling number of drones and drone types are used in the Ukraine war, from small observation drones, over supply drones, drop drones, fast one way FPV kill drones up to almost regular drone swarm exchanges with 100+ drones going one way (indigenous Ukrainian drones one way, clones of Iranian Shaheds from the Russian side). An oil terminal in Feodosia is still burning after the latest Ukrainina strike. There was even a few cases of re-purposed ultra light aircraft serving as one way drones for ultra long range strikes on the Ukrainian side. In another region Israel has to shoot down various terrorist launched one way UAVs almost regularly by this point & uses UAVs heavily by itself. So while US certainly did pioneer UAV use, it seems to be it is getting eclipsed by other states in this area.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoThis system would not work against camouflage.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoI mean it would you just have to put different optics on it thermal, near infrared and normal, and have three different detection neural nets
- lupusreal 2y agoA read a comment here a while ago about "search and rescue" being a euphemism for military applications and that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this story.
- inexcf 2y agoEveryone is thinking the same thing reading that headline. In a stroke of comedic genius the link still says "bodies" instead of "people".
- scintill76 2y agoI’m amazed this problem isn’t fixed in every CMS, or at least publishing team processes, by now (the problem is that the link slug is generated from the first title and doesn’t update when the title is updated.)
- 0xffff2 2y agoI'm not a web developer at all, but I thought keeping the URL was intentional for SEO reasons.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0_____0 2y agoIt's basically the FREE POINT square on the bingo card at this point. When someone builds a cool robot that they don't know what to do with, it's inevitably for SAR. I've worked on a couple of them myself.
- hiddencost 2y agoFree business ideas, because I want this to exist: Use drones with IR cameras: * Find deer after they're shot. Right now you need to hire a blood hound and it takes hours * Do wildlife surveys for conservation and management departments * Pest management for farmers
- arkh 2y agoLaunch from car while stuck in some random traffic jam: learn the cause of the jam and how long it is.
- kjs3 2y agoThere was a recent story about a medivac helicopter not being able to land to help accident victims because someone had parked their drone over the wreck to check it out/get clicks.
- tashi 2y agoA good idea unless it becomes popular. I'm picturing bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway with a cloud of drones overhead. Each person in their individual car using their individual drone to all report back the same thing: that everything is moving slowly because there are just too many cars on the road right now. With luck, the drones only crash into each other every once in a while, just like the cars below.
- rnewme 2y agoJust get cb radio
- Scoundreller 2y ago
- catskul2 2y ago> The weather was unusually mild for the season, and Kelly thought he might even have time to “bag” a second Munro, I really hate when people use very uncommon terms without defining them. (or sometimes even people's names) It's not that I couldn't make a guess based on context, but it's distracting, and I feel like my eyes must have skipped over something and I often keep going back over the text to see what I must have missed reading. I imagine this is sometimes caused by sloppy editing, especially when they refer to a last name of a person who has yet to be introduced in the article, but I think sometimes it's a deliberate choice and I object.
- arrowleaf 2y agoPeak bagging is a very common term in the outdoor sports world. This complaint is like a non-tech person reading a Wired article that mentions JSON and complaining that there's no explainer.
- lukeinator42 2y agoIt's honestly even closer to a non-tech person complaining about the word upload being used without an explainer.
- infecto 2y agoWhich is I assume an extension from the usage in hunting to "bag" an animal which is to catch/kill.
- closewith 2y agoNo, both stem from literarily and figuratively putting things in a bag. You can bag anything, a kiss, an award, item, person, accomplishment, etc.
- infecto 2y agoDo you have any source for your disagreement. Last time I checked the phrasing as it applies to a game bag goes quite far back which would hint at its usage in later examples that you provided. "Many figurative senses, such as the verb meaning "to kill game" (1814) and its colloquial extension to "catch, seize, steal" (1818) are from the notion of the game bag (late 15c.) into which the product of the hunt was placed. This also probably explains modern slang in the bag "assured, certain" (1922, American English). To be left holding the bag (and presumably nothing else), "cheated, swindled" is attested by 1793." https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=bag https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=bag
- pgraf 2y agoI don‘t see any hint of AI being used here, but rather a handcrafted computer vision algorithm. Can anyone more involved in the matter elaborate if there was an actual AI model used?
- snapcaster 2y agoI'm so tired of this argument. AI is a blurry term as it's used in the world. Who the fuck cares if this is "officially AI" or not? Can we just stop having this discussion?
- yifanl 2y agoWe don't have a formal classification of which technologies can be considered "AI", but computer vision would feel like a valid entrant to me.
- nostrademons 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- keybored 2y agoI thought that AGI covered that. AGI to my mind doesn’t have to surpass human thinking. It just has to be categorically the same as it (it can be less powerful, or more). It has to be general. A chess machine in a box which can’t do anything else is not general.[1] I’ve always been fine with calling things AI even though they are all jumbles of stats nonsense that wouldn’t be able to put their own pants on. Does a submarine swim? No, but that’s just the metaphor that the most vocal adherents are wedded to (at the hips). The metaphor doesn’t harm me. And to argue against it is like Chomsky trying to tell programming language designers that programming languages being languages is just a metaphor. [1] EDIT: In other words it can be on the level of a crow. Or a dog. Just something general. Something that has some animalistic-like intelligence.
- nostrademons 2y ago
- idunnoman1222 2y agoIt’s a long article and I’m on mobile. Do they link the code or not?
- schiffern 2y ago"MRMap is free for use by Mountain Rescue Teams. While being free it is NOT open source." http://www.mrmap.org.uk/index.php/introduction http://www.mrmap.org.uk/index.php/introduction Relevant changelogs are 6.0a and 6.0b. http://mrmap.org.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=24 http://mrmap.org.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=24
- vzaliva 2y agoSatellite SOS, recently introduced in iPhone and Google Pixel phones, will help a lot with lost hiker cases. However, drone-based search will still be useful in case the hiker broke the phone or is too incapacitated to use it.
- mschuster91 2y agoThere's another pretty common case: children who get lost somehow or decide to go on walks by their own and don't find their way back home but seek shelter wherever they can. I'm training for drone-based SAR at the German THW (Technical Relief Agency) at the moment, and that's probably going to be the majority of usecases.
- tay_bridge 2y agoAs somebody familiar with the area described in the article I cannot fathom how somebody could be lost, conscious (article mentions messages were exchanged) for so long.
- Sparkyte 2y agoI have always wanted to get into robotics. Maybe my next evolution in stuff is robotics. I'm starting to get tired of big corporate software engineering. These silly things are neat. I'm also really interested in the snake/worm robots that dig to find people and inflate to move rubble.
- ehnto 2y agoI had a similar thought years ago. Recently I built a CNC machine and it was a great blend of hands on, practical building work and software work. The software domain being a new challenge was fun too. It felt great to excercise existing skills in a new domain, to reach a new totally novel goal for me. Now I barely use it, which does suggest that building it is what I really wanted to do all along and that kind of validates that robotics is probably a hobby I'd enjoy.
- modhash 2y agoDoes anyone know if there is something similar to this open source?
- x62Bh7948f 2y agoWALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723311
- westurner 2y ago{Code-and-Response, Call-for-Code}/DroneAid : "DroneAid: A Symbol Language and ML model for indicating needs to drones, planes" (2010) https://github.com/Code-and-Response/DroneAid https://github.com/Code-and-Response/DroneAid .. https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-22707347 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-22707347 : CORRECTION: All but one of the DroneAid Symbol Language Symbols are drawn within upward pointing triangles. Is there a simpler set of QR codes for the ground that could be made with sticks or rocks or things the wind won't bend?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zero_k 2y agoSearch And Rescue (SAR) is sometimes VERY political. We build long-range RC airplanes to help find boats in distress at sea on the Mediterranean [1]. As you might expect, we could do 10x better, with less resources, if the powers that be wouldn't make it impossible to e.g. launch from an island and return to an island. So we launch from a boat, because it's not national territory and they can't make it impossible. Shameless Plug: If you wanna join, let us know. We definitely would benefit from better on&off-board image recognition. But there are many, less buzzword-y, challenges as well: designing, building & testing airplanes, training pilots, delivering planes & batteries (challenging due to Watt-Hour restrictions), remote issue debugging, etc. [1] https://tha.de/searchwing/ https://tha.de/searchwing/
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoIn case it needs to be spelled out, the problem is Europe has a maritime duty to rescue [1]. Once rescued, it has a duty to consider asylum and take care of the migrants/refugees [2]. Essentially, once SAR identifies a migrant vessel in distress, the closest country is forced to admit them. The duty to rescue means "a state cannot legally prohibit its vessels from rescuing persons at sea." This technically covers search. But some Mediterranean governments have taken the view that if they don't see the migrant vessel sink they don't have a duty to rescue. [1] https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/03/duty-rescue https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-cr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Status_of_Refugees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...