The University of Colorado Boulder’s Ann and H.J. Smead Engineering Sciences department is partnering with the Boulder Emergency Squad to evaluate the use of AI-enabled drones in search and rescue operations.
The research allows rescuers to feed information to drones, which can then independently help teams scout locations or find individuals.
Hunter Ray, an aerospace engineering doctoral student at CU Boulder who is also a volunteer rescuer with the Boulder Emergency Squad, is aiding in the upcoming research and expressed the positive impacts it may have on modern-day public safety.
Hunter Ray, a CU doctoral candidate and rescue volunteer, talks about his research on AI-enabled drones being used in search and rescue missions. (Cliff Grassmick/Staff Photographer)
“When it comes to using drones, we’ve been using them on the team since 2016 so we’re very familiar with how to implement them in operations but when we have one drone in the field we often have two or three people to manage the aircraft; piloting it, keeping it charged, and coordinating its operation with the rest of the incident and getting that information right back to whoever needs it.”
Boulder Emergency Squad, “the swiss-army knife of law enforcement agencies”, as Ray put it, is a non-profit volunteer technical search and rescue team serving Boulder County and is mainly funded by the sheriff’s office.
Ray stated that during search and rescue missions, there’s a lot of moving parts, and that delegating tasks to the AI-enabled drones could free up some hands.
“It’s kind of delegating responsibility to the aircraft on its own and then the user can charge batteries, collaborate on radio, kind of deal with higher level steps,” said Ray.
According to Ray, at times it can be difficult to operate the controls while focusing on finding a person.
“So what this new project is doing is kind of elevating that decision making that our operators are doing, so instead of giving that low level, go here, go forward, you’re saying (to the drone) here’s the mission as a whole, this is what’s important to the environment, go look and tell me what you can find.”
Ray clarified that there’s always going to be a person at the center of the system and that the intention of the project is not to replace the user.
“There’s this misconception around autonomy … Just like there’s no autonomous firefighter or police officer, there’s not going to be a fully autonomous system. So it has to be able to work together and with people in public safety especially in these kinds of dynamic and uncertain environments,” said Ray.
Chief Andy Amalfitano for the Boulder Emergency Squad believes that the implementation of this technology not only will help save lives but will reduce the time spent searching for people.
“When you say ‘we save lives’ it always sounds dramatic. But in our case, saving a life is searching for someone and finding them before they’re at a point where they are not going to make it, right?” said Amalfitano. “So we might not actually save their life that moment, but we are reducing the harm by finding them sooner. “
Nisar Ahmed, associate professor at CU Aerospace, is ecstatic about the implementation of the project’s prospects and what it could mean for public safety moving forward.
“People like Hunter who are actually doing the work are valuable for us as researchers … because we can find other ways of taking the same technology and using it in other domains.” said Ahmed. “It is pretty exciting that it is actually in the air.”