An interesting trial that combines aerial drone technology and crowd sourcing as Mountain Rescue tools will take place later this month in the Lake District. If this virtual rescue technique gets off the ground it may have a lot of potential.
What would be really interesting is if they released all the data afterwards i.e. all the image data and the locations that people thought might be a casualty. Eventually you might obtain enough data to train a computer to automatically pick out the likely locations.
<< I would be careful of crowd sourcing, there will a lot of useless input initially. Will it work out that the input accepted from the public is slowly reduced to that from experts? Perhaps it should be.
More of a red herring than a drone. It's not all weather and it only flies for 20 mins.
Not to say a drone couldn't be useful but this one looks more like something for inspecting chimneys and suchlike in good weather.
alexgoodey17 Jul 2013
I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Robert Koester at the University of Surrey last month, he did mention drones as a future opportunity in SAR and having myself seen their use in a number of fields, including commercial forestry (for canopy penetrating measurement of standing timber), agree that there was great potential in the area.
Koester "wrote the book" on search and rescue, and revolutionised the way SAR is managed globally.