All joking about St. Bernard unemployment aside, it is undeniably a good thing that these dogs be largely replaced with mechanized vehicles for the initial phases of search and rescue.
The way for such small UAVs (SUAVs) has been paved by Amazon as it has forged ahead with the technology as part of its delivery fleet.
Since their heyday in the rescue arena, there have been a number of advances in technology that have led to the development of mechanized rescue apparatus that means that if you have the bad luck of needing a rescue after an avalanche, the air moving on your face might not be the hot breath of a gargantuan panting canine, but rather the wind from the rotor blades of an unmanned aerial vehicle, aka drone.
The latest advance in this technology comes out of the University of Warwick School of Engineering in Coventry, England where they have developed a UAV capable of delivering immediate assistance to those in distress before any larger rescue team arrives to complete the mission. The creation of such a creature required a lot of complex geometry as the UAV doesn’t have a stabilizing tail, still needs to be able to glide, and has to be able to carry its batteries and radio equipment.
The drone was not the product of a massive R&D program by a company with extensive resources, but rather the result of the efforts of seven fourth-year students working as part of an industry and government supported program called Horizon (AM).
This program has as its aim the advancement of Additive Manufacturing in the aerospace industry and these students knew just what they wanted to do as part of this effort. They are currently looking at customized software that would provide a plan for the payload for each emergency. Professor of Engineering Simon Leigh served as the faculty guide during this project explained how such a program would work: “It would suggest the load out you would need an how to balance it to get the right center of gravity. So we cataloged the supplies we want to put in it and worked out where they might sit in the airframe.”
With a large-format 3D printer at their disposal, it quickly became clear that this was the perfect technology for the fabrication of their machine, freeing them up to approach the more daunting task of the design itself. Rather than utilizing a traditional fuselage, which adds more weight than desired to the UAV, they decided to create their own, as Ed Barlow, who served as the project’s design lead, described: “They all use an airframe that you can go and buy from a shop. We needed our own custom airframe, made specifically for long-distance flight with a heavy payload. The fuselage is essentially dead weight. It doesn’t generate any lift on the aircraft. We went with a blended-wing body, or ‘flying wing,’ where the fuselage is built into the wing such that the fuselage, as well as the wings, generate lift.”