INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Mobile Technology
NEC drone technology locates missing natural disaster victims by mobile phone
NEC Laboratories Europe has prototyped new , AI-enabled drone technology that can locate natural disaster victims using their personal devices in areas with damaged or no cellular infrastructure .
NEC Laboratories Europe has prototyped new , AI-enabled drone technology that quickly locates natural disaster victims using their mobile phones or smart devices in areas with damaged or no cellular infrastructure .
Finding disaster victims is slow and resource intensive . To locate victims , emergency response teams rely on line-of-sight or being in close proximity and mortality rates are often high . NEC ' s new prototype technology , SARDO ( Search-And-Rescue DrOne ), greatly expands search and rescue capabilities by using an autonomous drone as a mobile cellular base station to identify signals from smart devices of victims as it flies nearby .
an autonomous drone . Using pseudotrilateration , SARDO , as a mobile base station , acts as a single anchor that retrieves multiple distance measurements from a disaster victim ' s smart device , taken by the drone over its flight time . The SARDO drone uses Machine Learning to calculate the position of a victim ' s device even when that person is moving . The drone continually adjusts itself based on their predicted motion until it has identified the exact position of a victim .
Antonio Albanese , Research Associate , NEC Laboratories Europe , said : " SARDO brings together the increasingly higher penetration rate of smart devices in our society and the ability of drones to reach harsh locations . We can now combine these technologies to build a standalone localisation system that effectively supports first responders in disaster recovery operations . Requiring no pre-deployment effort , it can be up and running within minutes and keep the related deployment complexity to a minimum ."
SARDO works by identifying the unique identification number of a disaster victim ' s eSIM or SIM card using the resource control connection that it establishes with a base station . With required emergency approvals , the SARDO drone can search for both a specific victim and all unknown victims within a given region . In collaboration with the network operator , search and rescue teams can also communicate directly with a victim via their devices . In large disasters with many victims , multiple SARDO drones can be used to scale up search and rescue efforts . p
Existing device tracking technology , such as GPS or standard cellular trilateration , is not suited for natural disaster situations . GPS tracking requires that a disaster victim be in possession of a GPS-enabled smart device and that GPS tracking be active at the time of the disaster . In the event of a natural disaster , such as an earthquake or snow avalanche , cellular network infrastructure may not be working , or the disaster may have occurred in an area with inadequate coverage like a remote , mountainous region . This limits or prevents network operators from locating victims using their mobile phone signals .
SARDO fills this gap by incorporating the functionality of a cellular base station into
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