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.
Its not just a neat idea; its inevitable that quadcopters take a bigger role in the future.
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.
Quadcopters have wonderful physical properties that make them suitable for maneuvering in tight spaces, far beyond a helicopter.
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.
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.
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.