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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...
"Mr Burns, we've lost 20% of our drones"
"Well then... Send more drones!"
But honestly, if the drones are operating as a swarm then a downed drone could report it's last known location to it's peers for easier recovery.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-07/thousand...
> 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.