IR-eyed Drone For Search-and-Rescue

IR-eyed Drone For Search-and-Rescue

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Getting lost while hiking can turn out bad, really bad. Search-and-rescue statistics show that you’re twice as likely to die if you get lost hiking than if you literally went out into nature with the intention of killing yourself. And it’s not like it’s a rare occurrence. In the United States alone, the most developed country in the world, some 4,000 people get lost each year while hiking. Finding these people is not always easy. It’s time consuming, manpower intensive, and needs to be done quickly in order to have a decent a shot at saving lives.

Meet Sentry, a project by Stefan Weissberg to use an ultralight drone with infrared vision to find lost hikers. As hikers’ body heat stands out against the cold wilderness, and drones can fly and spot it from a pretty high altitude, using these machines to find hikers’ would significantly reduce the time needed to find them, thus increasing the likelihood of reaching them before it’s too late. This is crucial. Search-and-rescue statistics show that in colder climates, during the winter, some 20 percent of hikers perish before rescue teams reach them.

Sentry seems perfectly suited for the job at hand. Weighing just 1 kg, Sentry could be brought to the scene in a backpack, but despite its diminutive size, it carries just enough punch and can withstand wind gusts of about 88 km/h. It can be controlled from 2 km away while receiving a 640×480 infrared video feed of surroundings. A less expensive model can record HD video in the visible spectrum to onboard memory card.

The biggest current limitation is the battery. Sentry only has enough juice to fly for 15 minutes at a time, but that should be enough to provide invaluable surveillance in time-critical situations.

The IR model will set back a search-and-rescue department $7,500, while the cheaper variant goes for only $2,500.