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Comment by juiced | Hacker News Reader

This is great for search and rescue.

I expect a drone with a low light and/or thermal camera to be immensely more useful for SAR.

That also reminds me of an interesting research paper last year about a "Machine Learning Approach to Visual Perception of Forest Trails for Mobile Robots".

( http://robohub.org/drones-recognise-and-follow-forest-trails... or directly http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7358076/ and probably available on sci-hub )

Imagine "smart" thermal-imaging goggles that don't just show you what they're filming, but rather spray light out and capture that image—along with the angle it and position was shot at—then send it to a server, where it gets photo-stitched together with what everyone else's goggles are filming to create a globally illuminated 3D model—which is then what gets sent back and shown in each person's goggles. Anytime a person—or drone—"saw" part of the landscape, it have an effect for everyone else analogous to removing fog of war in an RTS game.

In some cases, yes. This drone has its use cases too.

Like e.g. when you have boots on the ground. Being able to literally turn the night into day outdoors is useful.

I would like to learn of examples when would this be useful. My layman's understanding is as follows:

If we're searching for something that we don't know an approximate location of, depriving everyone around of night vision, making it impossible for helicopters to be nearby and possibly even making thermal imaging devices less useful are disadvantages enough. The only advantage I can see is increased depth and color perception.

If we're searching for something that we know an approximate location of, fair point. Alas, I expect that this is a rarish situation (we either know that the missing person is somewhere in the general area, or within voice range in this particular direction; or we have visual contact).

If we've found something/someone and need to move it/her, we either are in no hurry and need little illumination or we're in a hurry and really care about night vision while carrying the person later or care about being helicopter-friendly (bright light most certainly isn't).

I can't imagine other SAR usecases (other than essentially searching or rescuing).

Actual magnesium flares would make more sense for this use.

You don't get continuous control of flares' brightness and positioning, though?

I imagine you could attach a flare to the bottom of a drone to get a similar light intensity, without carrying a heavy battery setup.

You probably could, but the likely outcome of a magnesium fire burning right underneath a LiPo battery pack might get messy.

Well, magnesium flares are usually cool enough to hold in your hand while the tip is burning, so if you attached it pointing down it should be fine? It's only a guess though.

Do magnesium flares actually get similar light intensities? If it is the case, then I'd imagine the person holding such a flare is essentially blinded by the light.

Mortar illum shells.

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