We’re developing a UAV program for SAR in New Hampshire. Lots of things “in flight” on this. Some recent posts:
We are flying a lot of training scenarios. Educate the canine handlers, develop use cases, evaluate software, evaluate hardware, develop SOPs, everything.
I am sharing the following video from a recent training session to share some of our findings in an informal manner and to hopefully encourage others to do the same.
(If you are in New England and working on a UAV program for Public Safety, please contact me and I’ll add you to the New England Council for Public Safety email list. If you are elsewhere, I encourage you to join the National Council.)
Visual demonstration of requirements:
1) Really need a “go to UTM (or lat/long)” capability. The handler was under a tree and finding her was the first problem.
2) Seeing anything on a small screen is hard. I missed the ripples while flying. During playback, they clearly indicated where the handler was.
3) Need communications protocol. She was trying to guide me to a clue. Right, left, et al aren’t clear. River left only makes sense to river situations. (IR illuminators?) We did have radio comms but without a VOX mic, that slowed the process down.
4) Need strobes on the handlers to quickly locate them.
5) I am right over a pink Croc. Did you see it? I certainly did not until later.
Additional challenges, with narration:
A lot of people ask me about search patterns, height, detection capabilities, etc. I figured I’d just share this video and narrate it to show, in real time, some of the challenges I was facing.
Note: This is all done with a Mavic Pro. Other (more expensive) platforms will address some of these issues.
