Edible Drones

Narrow and novel  application here.

ACM NEWS

Stranded Without Food? Edible Drone Has Snackable Wings  By CNET, November 17, 2022

The wings of this drone are nutritious and, depending on what you think about rice cakes, delicious.

The drone's design uses some familiar-looking airplane-like components; the big difference is that its fixed wing is made from rice cakes and gelatin.

It's a nightmare scenario. You're on an ambitious mountain hike when you get lost, injured or stranded. The good news is help is finally on the way, but the bad news is it's going to take time to reach you and you're out of food. That's when a buzzing drone comes flying in for a landing. Not only do you get the snacks, medicine or water it's carrying, you can eat the wings to tide you over until the rescue team arrives.

This scenario could become real. A team with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) has developed a prototype edible drone. The munchable machine is part of a broader project called RoboFood. RoboFood is about investigating edible robots for humans and animals as well as foods that behave like robots.

The team published its work online with the title "Towards edible drones for rescue missions: design and flight of nutritional wings." The study is tackling the problem of getting commercial drones to carry enough of a payload to help people in emergency situations.

  Full Article.   

Roboticized Insect Rescue

Interesting application,  Will the small size work for typical applications?  Note these are actual insects being used! So this is bio-augmentation rather then mimicry.   A considerable result if it works practically    An example of using small size to enable search and rescue. 

Robotized Insects May Search Collapsed Buildings for Survivors   By The Economist, March 28, 2022

Researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University have developed robotized insects that could be used to search for survivors in collapsed buildings.  The researchers outfitted Madagascar hissing cockroaches with backpacks featuring a communications chip, a carbon dioxide sensor, a motion sensor, an infrared camera, and a small battery.

The cockroaches are controlled by algorithms that respond directly to the backpack sensors. The researchers tested the so-called cyber-roaches in a simulated disaster zone spanning 25 square meters, which contained concrete blocks, people, and decoys like a microwave oven and a laptop.

Artificial intelligence programmed into the camera identified signs of life such as movement, body heat, and elevated carbon dioxide levels, sending alerts to rescuers if a survivor has been detected.

The researchers found the software correctly recognized humans 87% of the time.

From The Economist     

Rescue with Technology

 Have noted this trend, is moving quickly.   Much more at the link.

Technology to the Rescue, By Samuel Greengard, Commissioned by CACM Staff,  August 31, 2021

In the aftermath of a major flood, mudslide, earthquake, mine collapse, shipwreck or structural failure, first responders must move quickly—but also must tread carefully. In many cases, it is difficult to spot survivors in rubble and debris, and working conditions can range from challenging to extraordinarily dangerous.

Although there is no simple fix, robotic devices and sensing systems are beginning to fly, creep, crawl, and otherwise locomote into the physical world. Using advanced sound detection systems, cameras, infrared, biosensors, and other equipment, researchers are engineering robotic devices that can aid first responders and take search and rescue into the digital age.

Says Timothy Chung, program manager in the Tactical Technology Office at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), "Robots can provide insights that save lives and deliver other critical information across a spectrum of emergency situations—including places where lighting and breathing are challenges." ...

Using advanced sound detection systems, cameras, infrared, biosensors, and other equipment, researchers are engineering robotic devices that can aid first responders and take search and rescue into the digital age.  ...    Credit: DARPA   ... 

Robots Could Save you From Drowning

Seems little end to what robots could do.

Autonomous Underwater Robot Saves People From Drowning  By Fraunhofer Institute (Germany)

March 8, 2021

A research team from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies, and Image Exploitation developed an underwater rescue robot with the help of the city of Halles water rescue service.

A research team at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies, and Image Exploitation has developed an underwater rescue robot with the help of the city of Halle's water rescue service. The autonomous system will aid lifeguards and lifesavers, and rescue swimmers from drowning. Surveillance cameras register the movements and position of a distressed swimmer and transmit coordinates to the robot, which is dispatched from a docking station on the pool floor.

Upon reaching the swimmer, the robot carries them to the surface, with a mechanism for fixing the swimmer in place preventing him/her from sliding down as they surface.

The robot requires acoustic sensors to rescue people in lakes with limited visibility; a test under such conditions showed the robot could successfully rescue a dummy swimmer in just over two minutes.

From Fraunhofer Institute (Germany)

Search and Rescue Drone uses Phones

Makes sense, and a way to coordinate the search for multiple kinds of search conditions and requirements.

Search-and-Rescue Drone Locates Victims by Homing in on Their Phones  By IEEE Spectrum,  February 24, 2021

The Search-And-Rescue DrOne (SARDO) platform was developed to enable a single drone to act as a moving cellular base station, do large sweeps over disaster areas, and locate survivors of disasters using signals from their phones.

The Search-And-Rescue DrOne (SARDO) platform developed by researchers at Germany's NEC Laboratories Europe uses off-the-shelf components, integrating aerial drones, artificial intelligence, and smartphones to find survivors of disasters using signals from their phones.  SARDO utilizes a drone as a mobile cellular base station that sweeps disaster areas and conducts time-of-flight measurements, while a machine learning (ML) algorithm surveys the area and calculates the location of victims.

A second ML algorithm helps locate survivors on the move by estimating each person's trajectory.

In field experiments, the drone could localize missing people to within a few tens of meters in roughly three minutes per victim.

From IEEE Spectrum

Saving Lives with Swarms of Drones

Self assembling and autonomous drones for safety and rescue platforms.

Saving Lives with Aerial Drones in CACM

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception Laboratory have created a system of aerial drones that can connect to form rigid structures for emergency rescues. .... "