Two exhausted surfers attempt to escape the force of the waves. A small drone reaches them and flies a few metres above them, dropping life jackets over their heads that will allow them to return to shore. It happened a few months ago off the coast of Brisbane, Australia, thanks to the fast reaction of the local rescue staff, who at that time were testing the drone’s potential use to monitor swimmers and detect sharks.
The upshot was two lives saved in just over a minute, when real lifeguards would have most likely arrived too late.
S.O.S. – drone
Agile, easy to control and with increasingly sensitive “eyes”, drones (also called UAVs or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have enormous potential when it comes to small operations connected to distress at sea. Additionally, for at least ten years they have been widely used in accidents and disasters, both for patrol purposes and for emergency response.
Hovering in the air, they can almost travel without having to overcome any obstacles. They are versatile in terms of the load that can be transported. They can reach heights that avoid exposure to risks on the ground, such as large fires or explosions, proving useful when it becomes difficult for operators to understand how to intervene without mapping the situation in real time. Or in natural disasters such as earthquakes and nuclear accidents, when it is dangerous for rescue workers to cross the “red line” beyond which there may be some survivors.
They are also very fast: they can easily hover above city traffic at a speed of 50 kilometers per hour and make a difference when a few minutes is all that separates life and death. For example, when transporting a defibrillator to a person who is having a heart attack or other resuscitation devices.
Drones and access to care
There are remote areas of the planet where huge distances, bad or non-existent roads and high transport costs make health services inaccessible to many citizens. It can take hours and hours of travel to reach the nearest hospital or clinic, which, needless to say, often has dramatic consequences.
Consequently, in countries like Rwanda and Malawi, drones are at the center of various projects that are the result of collaborations between governments, health agencies and startups. Their objectives include the delivery of first aid kits, drugs or transfusion bags (in case of postpartum bleeding, for example, or serious anemia caused by malaria), reducing transport times to a few minutes, rather than several hours, which has a high impact on survival rate.
Drones can not only be used in emergency situations, but also to transport diagnostic tools, blood samples for analysis and, for a while now, also vaccines.
The St. Bernard robot
You are trapped in snow after an avalanche, or under rubble, in the dark or dust. You hear a noise: someone is digging towards you. A snout watches you closely, two paws help you out of the hole and you find yourself on the back of a kind of large mechanical St. Bernard who carries you to safety.
This is what could happen thanks to the latest generation of search and rescue robots made to move overland. Creatures specifically designed to face every different type of emergency, terrain and urgency: with two or four legs, equipped with wheels or tracks and with varying degrees of speed, agility, resistance and flexibility.
Nature is the major inspiration for these technologies: ibexes for machines designed to go up slopes, cheetahs for those that have to run, insects for those intended to climb up walls or jump over obstacles and worms and snakes for those that operate by crawling or diving into the ground (and these are just a few of many possible examples).
Designed to perform better than humans (some are stronger, some are faster and some are designed to stay active for longer than the human body allows), they make up a “zoo” of extremely diverse designs, sizes and materials. The only common denominator is that they are expendable, should this enable human lives to be saved.
Looking to the future
One of the first uses of rescue robots was during the search for survivors following the terrible attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. But other uses have also hit the news: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, for example, when small robots entered the contaminated areas, eliminating the need for workers to initially expose themselves to risk, as well as the Costa Concordia disaster, when underwater robots equipped with cameras contributed to the search for those missing in the wreckage.
In short, these technologies are already operational, but there is certainly considerable room for improvement. Both drones and terrestrial robots are remote-controlled machines, so their movements and operations are not autonomous.
The next step, which will mark a second era of robotics, will be the quality that allows these “beings” to see and operate by acquiring awareness and thus being able to make decisions in real time. The quality that allows a drone to fly by perceiving the surrounding space like a bird or a bat, or that causes, for example, a robot with paws to sense when the ground is too slippery or soft to walk on. In other words, the quality defined as instinct in humans and other animals and artificial intelligence in the case of robots.