The number of people going missing in the Outback – most notably prospectors – has been rising sharply.
In the past two weeks alone, a woman in her 50s spent a night in the bush near Kalgoorlie after wandering away from her campsite, and a man in his 30s became lost while prospecting. And late last year, one elderly man suffered dehydration and heat exhaustion after getting lost near Coolgardie, while another survived six days on the Goldfields by eating black ants.
While it is always a cause of great celebration when those who go missing in the Outback are found safe and well, the search and rescue operations can easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars … but the drone age could be about to change all that.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) robotics professor Jonathan Roberts has told the ABC that search and rescue was a logical application for drones.
“The technology does exist for a drone to go out, fly a search area, fill in the search area with pictures on the ground, and even do automatic detection to look for people,” he said. “It’s relatively easy to operate them in areas that are uncluttered.”
And WA Police are apparently already looking at drone technology closely.
“We certainly have an appetite for them,” Goldfields police superintendent Darryl Gaunt told the ABC. “They offer us a quality product, it’s highly portable and it’s also far more cost efficient than aircraft.”
* Comment below
How about people taking responsibility for their stupidity and taking more care as to knowing where they are, what direction they need to go to the nearest road or landmark where they have previously noted they will head for. Or at least carry some sort of signalling device when in the outback. The bloke who ate ants, was nothing but an idiot, he had a rifle and bullets, he could have easily lit a safe fire, used green foliage to create smoke and stayed put, instead of wandering aimlessly around.
Problem with the drone idea is the current laws about drones, state that a drone can’t be flown out of sight of the operator.
I also agree with the previous post.