This drone ambulance concept has the potential to save more lives | Hacker News Reader

This drone ambulance concept has the potential to save more lives

designer-daily.com

20 pointsswissgeek42 comments

Serious question, what advantage would this even have over a standard helicopter.

Having four independently controllable rotors is probably a lot more stable.

Having four independently controllable rotors makes it inherently unstable, needing a real time computer to keep it from flipping.

Helicopters, on the other hand, have positive stability.

Nope, it's less stable as the giant rotor acts as a large gyroscope. Quad copters work well with ultra-light weight electric motors, but the concept is focused on quickly changing how fast the blades spin so it does not scale very well.

@lultimouomo having a real-time computer to control four rotors in not something unachievable with current technology :) I would say that it's becoming almost a DIY tech.

Greater pool of potential pilots - ex-military, etc. vs. helicopter pilots.

In theory it should be cheaper to fly, there's much less going on mechanically in a fixed rotor and there doesn't seem to be a pilot. However, I'm pretty sure that people have shown that creating human-scale quads is actually impossible with current battery tech. So, IMHO this is just another design that doesn't have anything to do with what is possible in the real world today.

Who says they have to use battery tech? On a human scale drone I'm sure they could find room for a gas tank.

For a quadcopter you need very fine control of the rotors, making a combustion engine hard to use. So then you will need to do combustion -> dynamo -> electricity -> electric motor.

A helicopter is controlled in a completely different way.

Larger multicopters are free to use alternative control methods. The method used in toy multicopters is both inexpensive and cheap yet other options do exist.

It's a drone so we can assume that at least most of the piloting will be done by the computer. So you could have EMT just enter the address press "Fly", adjust lever to Fast and wait.

Retrograde advantage. I listen to my scanner and have some aviation interests and it seems a depressing truism that nobody ever needs helicopter ambulance service right next to a wanna be helipad in perfect weather. The human pilots are quite skilled and seem to fly almost by feel in the worst conditions. Lots of on site judgment calls about winds and power lines and trees and obstacles.

Something I think likely / inevitable is assistant drones flying in formation with a rescue chopper very closely coupled to the chopper autopilot. Its easy for a surprise wind gust to kill a chopper, but if you have a perimeter drone force hovering in perfect formation 100 meters away, you have 100 meters warning for the autopilot to react and prepare. Not to mention the usefulness of a drone for exotic rescue (ferry that rope down the gully for us to climb down and reach the victim) or accident scene lighting under bad conditions.

It would look like a quadrotor, and therefore be more hip and attract more press and possibly more investments.

If I'm being generous, I'd say the advantages are:

- Safer than a helicopter due to rotor redundancy

- Easier to pilot

Disadvantages

- More expensive to build

- Less stable in flight

- Probably can't glide down with autorotation as well in case of engine failure

- Probably needs to run with a turbine generating electricity rather than directly using the engine to drive the rotor

- The ease of flying benefit can be solved in software anyway.

A quadrotor doesn't have any sort of 'redundancy'. If you lose a rotor, you've lost control, and will be hitting the ground in pretty short order. I see multiple rotors as a disadvantage... more things to go wrong.

It depends on your design. You can build it with separate engines and manage to land safely on two diagonally opposite engines.

I'm not sure that's feasible. I've been flying multi-rotors for quit some time and if you lose a motor on a quad it's nearly instantaneously on a collision course with the ground. Y-6 or Hexacopter would be more feasible from a redundancy standpoint.

Quadroter no, but multirotor yes. DJI's S900 and S1000 are designed such that two props can fail and it stays in the air.

That depends heavily on your control system and how well you've tested it. In theory, a control system for a quadcopter that has independently controllable rotors could keep itself stable if one goes out. In practice, any control path you haven't tested probably won't work.

The biggest issue I see is dealing with the unbalanced torque... You could probably manage a 'controlled crash', but that's about it.

Potentially allow the vehicles to go to hostile environments (battlezones), bad weather conditions, and of course, epidemic zones (like ebola-struck regions). It will save pilot lives (crucial when there is a major event and many pilots are needed). And it will help contain disease.

A much more feasible idea is to use a drone to quickly deliver a defibrillator/AED to where it is needed, rather than for patient transfer:

http://www.medgadget.com/2014/11/ambulance-drone-delivers-de...

http://www.medgadget.com/2013/08/aed-drone.html

great and simple, this would be much more practical way of doing things ...AED drones.Thats simple and effective...I am wondering why its not applied everywhere already?

>I am wondering why its not applied everywhere already?

In the US? The FAA.

Useless. Regular helicopter has only single engine and single rotor (4x less chance for failure) and can land using auto-rotation. Plus electric batteries do not have enough power to lift such large drone.

More "Photoshop Engineering", no real study of energy needed for such a device. By the time it reached actual production.. you would have a helicopter.

"For example, this concept is made to have only room for the injured person, which is a terrible thing. In many cases, the person will need qualified medical people to take care of him during the trip to the hospital, this makes it impossible."

The renderings show an attendant with the injured person. Really though not seeing a huge advantage of this over what we have today.

It would have many advantages. Every bigger winter storm slows down emergency response - this potentially could get to the person faster than a snow plow followed by an ambulance. Same thing with flooding, landslides, avalanches..

On highways, bigger accidents block large parts of the road making it very hard to get to the injured.

It potentially could arrive faster to any place in its range than a regular ambulance could.

If it was fully autonomous you could deliver few EMTs to the place of an accident, and have them ship the worst cases to the hospital while staying at the site and working on stabilizing the rest.

I guess by "what we have today", parent was referring to helicopters.

Good point. I guess it's a matter of, in case this proves to be safe/adequate, how much each costs, not just in materials but in maintenance, use, wages (techs, pilots, etc), insurance and anything else you can think of.

@thu yes, and I assumed (apparently incorrectly) that it's obvious that helicopters won't work in such cases. let me rephrase :

Every bigger winter storm slows down emergency response - this potentially could get to the person faster than a snow plow followed by an ambulance and be able to land in your driveway or on the street, between the buildings. Same thing with flooding, landslides, avalanches..

On highways, bigger accidents block large parts of the road making it very hard to get to the injured, and is small enough to land on a side of a highway, or between crashed cars.

It potentially could arrive faster to any place in its range than a regular ambulance could, since it does not need to have a trained pilot, less maintenance, no control tower etc.

If it was fully autonomous you could deliver few EMTs to the place of an accident, and have them ship the worst cases to the hospital while staying at the site and working on stabilizing the rest. Helicopters are not autonomous.

It would be cheaper to make and operate.

Better?

Lots of hate here. How about: this drone may be safer than an ambulance, careening through intersections and hurtling down local roads?

Its not just a neat idea; its inevitable that quadcopters take a bigger role in the future.

I think there's always a level of technological pessimism with people. When I was a kid it was with computers. "This stupid thing? All its good for is holding recipes and I can get a recipe book that doesn't cost $3000!" Or when I was a teen, the pessimism of Mars missions was popular. I think there were 3 or 4 Mars movies all of which ended in disaster. Now its a boring budget line item at NASA.

The pessimists have been in high-gear lately about anything that removes human judgement from the equation. High profile anti-AI and anti-drone screeds are here to stay. I just think people buy into neo-ludditism very easily and lash out at automation because it says that humans aren't as important to the process as we thought we were. Ned Ludd vs progress is a story we have yet to learn from and are destined to repeat, probably endlessly, as automation and AI make more sense than human judgement and human risk in so many cases.

Our grandkids will be laughing at antiquated ideas like an error-prone human driver the same way we laugh at, say, riding a horse to work or hand-making things that are easily mass producible.

I don't think this is the kind of pessimism you see here. What people are basically saying is that this concept looks cool in the picture, but is crap from engineering point of view. No one is saying we don't need better tech for rescue operations.

Not quite? The hate was mostly 'why not a helicoptor' which shows a profound misunderstanding of the mechanics of a quadrotor.

A lot of hate towards this tech here is only based on one fact - it's not built with Javascript (yet)

Maybe someday... There is a lot of technology that needs to be developed between here and there... Current battery tech isn't even close to being able to manage this.

There are also a significant number of challenges that won't be easily solved with technology... In my experience, a significant number of emergency scenes do not have a readily accessible landing site within easy walking distance, and there are a lot of weather conditions that wouldn't trouble a ground based ambulance, but would ground this thing.

If you want a fun time take a look at projected "technology of the future" from the 1910s or 1950s. The former was lots of steam-powered versions of things that already existed and the latter was nuclear versions of the same. Now we are seeing the quadcopter/drone version of this particular delusion.

As others have pointed out, a quadcopter is ill-suited to this task, will probably not have the lift-capacity or range to make this work effectively, is not as safe as the helicopter version. While quadcopter drones may play a bigger role in the future it may also turn out that the sweet-spot for these devices is in moving small objects short distances, where they are already being used -- we might just be at a point where we can see the limit of what quadcopters can actually accomplish given battery tech available for the next twenty years or so.

Here is another idea to consider: scale down a real helicopter or a tiltrotor to handle a patient and attending nurse and attach drone controls to that.

Except it doesn't mean anything to say 'attach drone controls' to a helicopter. A quadcoptor has different physical performance characteristics that dictate the form of its controls. A helicopter will never behave similarly.

Quadcopters have wonderful physical properties that make them suitable for maneuvering in tight spaces, far beyond a helicopter.

The problem is that those same wonderful properties make them completely unsuitable for the task at hand. They have a weight threshold that severely limits their uses and they are unsafe for carrying anything important that cannot take a drop from max height at max velocity given the failure modes.

Making better/smarter autopilots for a small helicopter or VTOL aircraft that can actually fly point to point would be more useful and might actually work, unlike this quadcopter idea.

A one person drone delivering a paramedic to an accident might be almost as useful as one that can take the casualty back to hospital, at least to stabilise the patient. This might be useful for remote areas or urban congestion like a motorway tailback.

Ideally the drone might not need to land - just lower the medic (still in their seat?) on cables, release and fly off.

Sorry, but that's just nonsense. We already have that; it's called air medical services.

The Navy has been considering unmanned MEDEVACS for a few years now.

http://www.wired.com/2012/08/robot-medevac/

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