I can imagine cleanup effort required trying to recover 10-20% of those drones after crashes/battery depletion, resulting in littering forest with garbage.
Lots of people do die in the woods. It's a daily thing. What is much rarer is to know that someone is dying in the woods. The scenarios whereby these drones are lifesavers are only those where a search has been launch and the lost person is still alive but in peril of death. And even with 100+ drones you still need to know the area of the person. The woods can be very big.
The more efficient method, by far, is to have a device on the person from the start. Better coordination between search and cellular providers would do much in reducing search areas, at least when looking for people carrying cellphones.
Let's don't get ourselves lost in the maze of arguments here.
The big picture is, if you give the rescue team a good tool, their success rate will then increase, sometime by a big number.
There is a documentary about children missing in the woods called Missing 411 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEA9-mEOZtA). If you take look their search efforts, it is not hard to realize how many weight can be lifted by an automatic area scanning system.
In the documentary, the search and rescue team had to walk step by step doing almost blind searches. If you have an automatic system, you can just launch a scanning array of say 50 drones, very quickly the data will come in and provide indications on where the search effort should be prioritized.
Bottom line is, such system is better than the current (human manual search) one. If the technology can be properly developed and utilized, it can help save more lives.
Except that when you are looking for kids, and to a lesser extent elderly people, they become afraid and hide. Some rescued children talk of cyclops-like giants hunting them in the dark ... rescuers with headlamps. They hide from the people trying to find them, which makes friendly dogs a particularly powerful tool as nobody can really hide from a labrador. These people will probably hide from a swarm of drones too. I would.
> Except that when you are looking for kids, and to a lesser extent elderly people, they become afraid and hide.
Then maybe let each drone carry a Teddy Bear or/and a Rainbow Pony. I mean I would totally grab the wild drone for it's micro controllers.
Now, the truth is, we don't know how people would actually react to drones. Maybe a kid would hide even deeper, but that's an edge case here. The important thing is, this tool can generate real benefit for a rescue operation that no other tool can provide. How to use it properly is the responsibility of the rescue team.
Another thing is, with information provided by drones, the search and rescue operation itself can become safer. Which also enables a load of new possibilities.
Just because it can save more lives doesn't mean it overall 'better'. Because you're saving more lives at the cost of hugely increased ecological impact.
Like EPIRBs! The tech already exists and works anywhere on the planet with no dependence on cell towers. I've decided that if I ever go hiking in the woods, I'm going to get HAM certified and carry a GPS radio with a beacon, just in case.
Those only work for people that know that they need help and are able to activate the device. They don't work for people who do not know how bad a situation they are in and/or are injured to the point that they cannot activate the device.
Maybe we can have a drone swarm that cleans up the crashed drones. You should have a fairly good idea of where they are when they crash so you wouldn't need to do a full sweep of the location.
> As many as 2,000 elegant tern eggs were abandoned on a nesting island at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach after a drone crashed, scaring off the would-be parents.
