Drone Swarms to Support Search and Rescue Operations: Opportunities and Challenges

Emergency services organizations are committed to the challenging task of saving people in distress and minimizing harm across a wide range of events, including accidents, natural disasters, and search and rescue. The teams responsible for these operations use advanced equipment to support their missions. Given the risks and the time pressure of these missions, however, adopting new technologies requires careful testing and preparation. Drones have become a valuable technology in recent years for emergency services teams employed to locate people across vast and difficult to traverse terrains. These unmanned aerial vehicles are faster and cheaper to deploy than traditional crewed aircraft. While an individual drone can be helpful to personnel by quickly offering a bird’s eye view, future scenarios may allow multiple drones working together as a swarm to reduce the time required to locate a person. Given these potentially high payoffs, we explored the challenges and opportunities of drone swarms in search and rescue operations. We conducted interviews as well as initial user studies with relevant stakeholders to understand the challenges and opportunities for drone swarms in the context of search and rescue. Through this, we gained insights to inform the development of prototypes for drone swarm control interfaces, including both technical and human interaction concerns. While drone swarms can likely benefit search and rescue operations, the significant shift from single drones to swarms may necessitate reimagining how rescue missions are conducted. We distill our findings into five key research challenges: visualization, situational awareness, technical issues, team culture, and public perception. We discuss initial steps to investigate these further.