Search & Rescue

Challenge
In most Man Overboard (MOB) scenarios, a person can become unconscious in water within a few minutes. Ships need a system that alerts rescue crews seconds after a MOB situation occurs—providing coordinates, a flotation device, and a lifeboat to the exact geolocation. This requires data beyond the line of sight.

Time is a critical element in Search and Rescue operations for drowning incidents. The submersion time for people who survive intact or with mild neurological damage is less than 5 minutes (median), whereas the average for non-surviving victims is 16 minutes.

The likelihood of survival is significantly low for submersions over 10 minutes, but this improves drastically with a flotation device. A victim has an 80% higher survival chance with a survival time of 2-4 hours (18x higher). Given a ship cruise speed of 18-20 knots (10 m/s), rescuers have less than a minute to find and rescue a man overboard if the alert was raised immediately after the incident occurred.    

332 deaths from drowning in boating accidents are reported in the US yearly, compared to 3,536 non-boating drownings. A substantial number of staff, aircraft, and ships work together to search for a missing person (e.g., 3 aircraft and 60 vessels were looking for a man who fell from a fishing vessel in Canada). The calculation of 21 incidents reported, with the average search and rescue costing €0.9 M or €20 M/yr, adds to the total cost of claims from drowning incidents, reaching a value of €6.6 B/yr.

Solution

Upteko is developing a system solution to calculate the position of people falling overboard. An application, standard on our multipurpose drone, is connected to the Charging station of the drone, which, in turn, is linked to the AIS signal of the ship. This connection provides information about the ship's speed, wind direction, underwater current, and sailing path.

With this data, the direction of a MOB can be calculated, along with the distance the person would move in any direction per second.

With a simple interaction with the system's computer, anyone with access can command the drone with a push of a button. The drone takes off and activates the RGB and thermal sensor.
The drone then flies in the direction of the MOB, and the thermal sensor with AI detects the hotter pixels in the image, sending the exact location back to the bridge. This allows a safety boat to be sent directly to the victim, providing a significant advantage, especially at night when the MOB might not be visible in line of sight.