
Drones learn to search forest trails for lost people - jonbaer
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-drones-forest-trails-lost-people.html
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CraigJPerry
Forest trails are just a distraction from the real story here:

> When tested on a new, previously unseen trail, the deep neural network was
> able to find the correct direction in 85% of cases; in comparison, humans
> faced with the same task guessed correctly 82% of the time.

They made a computer better at identifying trails than a human. That they can
manage that and quickly enough to feed a flight control loop with directions
is mighty impressive.

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herbig
A couple of people hating on this. Despite the obvious fact that you can in
fact get lost on a trail, the progress of autonomous rescue drones doesn't
just end at following trails.

Once they're able to detect trails and follow them looking for people, the
next step would be detecting signs of where they might have wandered off
trail, or (especially in snowy conditions) detecting and following where they
have started their own trail.

~~~
devindotcom
You can also be injured, left behind, faint, stop to help someone, etc.

A drone that can follow a trail that changes quite a bit over the year and is
trained to recognize obvious trail signals (jacket on tree, reflectors) or
human voices offtrail as it passes ("help! over here!") would be excellent. A
drone pass at closing time might become a standard precaution and CYA thing
for parks, plus they can give trail notes like where it's poorly marked,
blockage and collapses, and so on.

~~~
samcheng
Ugh, I hope not! Nothing like ruining the joy of alpenglow with the high-
pitched buzz of the nanny state.

~~~
onion2k
To be fair, the wilderness being littered with dead bodies would probably ruin
it more.

~~~
samcheng
It isn't, though!

The only wilderness place I know that is 'littered with dead bodies' is Mt.
Everest. And that is from hypoxia and exposure, not getting lost.

EDIT: Hmm, and maybe Aokigahara Suicide Forest in Japan. Also not from getting
lost.

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jjsalamon
Amazing work! Where I lived in Australia tourists often would get lost and
quickly dehydrate, be at risk of hypothermia overnight or immobilize
themselves by breaking a leg. Phone coverage is not good in the country so you
couldn't call for help. Depending on your location, vegetation is difficult to
see through for search-and-rescue spotters in the air. Once you get off trail
it's not as simple as backtracking and so have to wait for help to arrive (so
long as you let someone know you were hiking ahead of time).

~~~
prawn
Makes me wonder if, when searching for someone lost in scrub, it'd be feasible
to launch a temporary, roaming mobile phone tower/repeater that might give the
hiker temporary phone access to get help?

~~~
eru
See [https://www.google.com/loon/](https://www.google.com/loon/)

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duaneb
A drone trained to seek out humans is one of my worst fears.

~~~
bcook
It was inevitable, even from a purely benevolent perspective.

Personally, I am much more worried about heart-disease, dementia, and
depression.

~~~
whybroke
And when new treatment arrives, how any individual will be able to afford any
two.

~~~
onion2k
Most developed nations have free universal healthcare paid for by taxation.
Perhaps the countries that don't will implement it if the alternative is
watching citizens die because they can't afford treatment.

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voltagex_
See also [http://uavchallenge.org/](http://uavchallenge.org/), plus Andrew
Tridgell's talk from LCA 2014, 2015 and 2016 :D

~~~
cpeterso
I wonder when we'll have a "Gumball Rally" for drones: an unaided, coast-to-
coast race. :)

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ommunist
Autonomous hunting drone becomes reality just a switch away.

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rokhayakebe
It should work the opposite way. You have a pack of tiny drones with you that
you can release and they go alert authorities.

~~~
oh_sigh
If by "tiny drones" you mean electromagnetic waves, you can just bring a sat
phone and call your mum and ask her to come pick you up.

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rdancer
s/lost people|missing persons/tenorists/g

Welcome the suicide drones.

~~~
onion2k
We can weaponise practically any technology breakthrough. That's a really bad
reason to stop making new things. We need to develop new, useful things _and_
work hard on making the world a place where everyone can live in peace so
they're not used as weapons.

~~~
thaw13579
To name a few counter-examples: solar panels, wind turbines, MRI, artificial
hearts, defibrillator, antibiotics, vaccines, refrigerator, lightbulb, the
list goes on. I wouldn't say people should stop making new things, but some
things are obviously going to be weaponized and that shouldn't be taken
lightly or worse ignored.

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foreigner
What about batteries? I think most quadcopter drones like the one pictured
only last for a few minutes before needing to be recharged. They won't be able
to cover much ground in that time.

~~~
enraged_camel
People have flown Phantom 3s longer than 3 miles (one way). That's a lot of
ground to cover out in the wilderness.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTr2vtWFYMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTr2vtWFYMU)

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sliverstorm
A very cool project, and drones could certainly move faster than people.
However practically speaking, lost people are frequently not on the trail.

~~~
timv
In my experience (7 years of NSW State Emergency Service)

(a) People are very often on the trail. An initial report of "lost" typically
means "didn't report in on time". Many times that means that they're just
slow, or injured, or walking in the wrong direction on a poorly marked trail.

They get found, no one makes a big deal of it, it never gets on the news, so
it doesn't register in our consciousnesses, but it's fairly frequent.

(b) The first step in a co-ordinated search effort is to search the paths. If
the search area is large (e.g. we know where they parked their car, but not
which path they took) then you can need to arrange a fair number of searchers
to cover all the paths. That's slow. Not just to do the searching, but also to
get a team mobilised and coordinated. If drones can do that job (even just a
first pass) it saves a lot of time and frees up a lot of searchers.

(c) There's "trails" and then there's _trails_. In Australian bush, a "trail"
might not actually be created by humans. It could easily be a kangaroo path,
and walkers sometimes stumble on to them and end up in places the searchers
didn't expect. The drones might be better at searching those paths.

(d) It's not uncommon for someone who gets lost to eventually stumble upon a
trail and not know where it is, where it leads, or which way to go. Just
because they're on a trail now, doesn't mean it's the one they started on.

(e) For people who want to be found, there's likely to be a fairly high
success rate in drones that move along all discoverable trails, emitting out
emergency messages and listening for responses. Most human search teams aren't
doing much more than that.

~~~
sliverstorm
I guess my perspective is skewed. I am on a mountain sar team. The sheriff
handles most of the "never gets on the news" cases, and calls us when it _is_
going to the news.

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aledalgrande
Interesting, useful and scary at the same time.

~~~
chrstphrhrt
I wonder if some kind of "anti-drone invisibility cloak" could be a thing. Or
some kind of tiny turreted laser light that can detect a camera and point a
beam into its lens. Maybe an app to detect signatures of drones approaching by
their radio signals or rotor sounds.

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sandworm101
>>> ...a small quadrocopter to autonomously recognize and follow forest
trails. [...] to accelerate the search for people lost in the wild.

If there are trails, then this is boarderline "the wild." Lost in parks maybe,
but wilderness by definition is off-trail. I'd rather see the drone that can
search through farmland. Kids do get lost in cornfields.

~~~
herbet_nibbd
Do you realise that this is a nasty comment, attempting to make it look like
you're more of an outdoor person than whoever wrote this article? Or is it
subconscious?

