
This drone ambulance concept has the potential to save more lives - swissgeek
http://www.designer-daily.com/this-drone-ambulance-concept-has-the-potential-to-save-more-lives-50875
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ashhimself
Serious question, what advantage would this even have over a standard
helicopter.

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JonRB
Having four independently controllable rotors is probably a lot more stable.

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Retric
Nope, it's less stable as the giant rotor acts as a large gyroscope. Quad
copters work well with ultra-light weight electric motors, but the concept is
focused on quickly changing how fast the blades spin so it does not scale very
well.

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jamessb
A much more feasible idea is to use a drone to quickly deliver a
defibrillator/AED to where it is needed, rather than for patient transfer:

[http://www.medgadget.com/2014/11/ambulance-drone-delivers-
de...](http://www.medgadget.com/2014/11/ambulance-drone-delivers-
defibrillator-by-air-video.html)

[http://www.medgadget.com/2013/08/aed-
drone.html](http://www.medgadget.com/2013/08/aed-drone.html)

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appreneur
great and simple, this would be much more practical way of doing things ...AED
drones.Thats simple and effective...I am wondering why its not applied
everywhere already?

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Phlarp
>I am wondering why its not applied everywhere already?

In the US? The FAA.

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jkot
Useless. Regular helicopter has only single engine and single rotor (4x less
chance for failure) and can land using auto-rotation. Plus electric batteries
do not have enough power to lift such large drone.

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nickhalfasleep
More "Photoshop Engineering", no real study of energy needed for such a
device. By the time it reached actual production.. you would have a
helicopter.

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51Cards
"For example, this concept is made to have only room for the injured person,
which is a terrible thing. In many cases, the person will need qualified
medical people to take care of him during the trip to the hospital, this makes
it impossible."

The renderings show an attendant with the injured person. Really though not
seeing a huge advantage of this over what we have today.

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mariusz79
It would have many advantages. Every bigger winter storm slows down emergency
response - this potentially could get to the person faster than a snow plow
followed by an ambulance. Same thing with flooding, landslides, avalanches..

On highways, bigger accidents block large parts of the road making it very
hard to get to the injured.

It potentially could arrive faster to any place in its range than a regular
ambulance could.

If it was fully autonomous you could deliver few EMTs to the place of an
accident, and have them ship the worst cases to the hospital while staying at
the site and working on stabilizing the rest.

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thu
I guess by "what we have today", parent was referring to helicopters.

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isaacremuant
Good point. I guess it's a matter of, in case this proves to be safe/adequate,
how much each costs, not just in materials but in maintenance, use, wages
(techs, pilots, etc), insurance and anything else you can think of.

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JoeAltmaier
Lots of hate here. How about: this drone may be safer than an ambulance,
careening through intersections and hurtling down local roads?

Its not just a neat idea; its inevitable that quadcopters take a bigger role
in the future.

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evgen
If you want a fun time take a look at projected "technology of the future"
from the 1910s or 1950s. The former was lots of steam-powered versions of
things that already existed and the latter was nuclear versions of the same.
Now we are seeing the quadcopter/drone version of this particular delusion.

As others have pointed out, a quadcopter is ill-suited to this task, will
probably not have the lift-capacity or range to make this work effectively, is
not as safe as the helicopter version. While quadcopter drones may play a
bigger role in the future it may also turn out that the sweet-spot for these
devices is in moving small objects short distances, where they are already
being used -- we might just be at a point where we can see the limit of what
quadcopters can actually accomplish given battery tech available for the next
twenty years or so.

Here is another idea to consider: scale down a real helicopter or a tiltrotor
to handle a patient and attending nurse and attach drone controls to that.

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JoeAltmaier
Except it doesn't mean anything to say 'attach drone controls' to a
helicopter. A quadcoptor has different physical performance characteristics
that dictate the form of its controls. A helicopter will never behave
similarly.

Quadcopters have wonderful physical properties that make them suitable for
maneuvering in tight spaces, far beyond a helicopter.

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evgen
The problem is that those same wonderful properties make them completely
unsuitable for the task at hand. They have a weight threshold that severely
limits their uses and they are unsafe for carrying anything important that
cannot take a drop from max height at max velocity given the failure modes.

Making better/smarter autopilots for a small helicopter or VTOL aircraft that
can actually fly point to point would be more useful and might actually work,
unlike this quadcopter idea.

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london888
A one person drone delivering a paramedic to an accident might be almost as
useful as one that can take the casualty back to hospital, at least to
stabilise the patient. This might be useful for remote areas or urban
congestion like a motorway tailback.

Ideally the drone might not need to land - just lower the medic (still in
their seat?) on cables, release and fly off.

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wahsd
Sorry, but that's just nonsense. We already have that; it's called air medical
services.

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vowelless
The Navy has been considering unmanned MEDEVACS for a few years now.

[http://www.wired.com/2012/08/robot-
medevac/](http://www.wired.com/2012/08/robot-medevac/)

