Saving critical minutes saves lives
Ambular’s primary purpose is to offer safer and more timely emergency response services, an industry in which saving critical minutes can save lives.
Rodrigues’s team takes on the difficult task of ensuring that the engineering of Ambular’s navigation and flight paths would be safer and more efficient than road travel.
“A standard ambulance circulates very fast through traffic, which is very dangerous,” Rodrigues explains. “Travelling by air is not only faster but safer in terms of potential collisions. The autonomous trajectory planning and control algorithms are key to the operation of a drone ambulance in a safe way. There has to be redundancy in actuators and sensors to increase safety.”
He adds that avoiding unforeseen obstacles can be done through what is called “sense and avoid.”
“The vehicle must have several sensors that can measure the approaching traffic — for example, birds. And then an avoid algorithm must be programmed into the flight management system to steer the vehicle away from the path followed by those birds.”
Rodrigues says one of the biggest concerns in planning safe trajectories for autonomous aircrafts in urban areas in a futuristic scenario will be other air traffic, such as air taxis. “The biggest challenge right now is the lack of regulations for autonomous air traffic in urban areas,” he notes. “The regulations must be in place first before it becomes a reality.”
Not only would a drone ambulance be faster, safer and more cost effective than traditional ambulances, it would also be capable of airlifting injured or trapped victims from hard-to-access disaster areas, which accounts for the victim’s safety as well as a first responder’s.
To the best of the Ambular team’s knowledge, this is the first ambulance drone in development, and the hope is that it will serve as a platform for future development of autonomous emergency response aircrafts.
“It is expected that in the future autonomous vehicles will be allowed to fly in urban areas,” Rodrigues says. “When that happens, it is clear to me that emergency situations would be the highest priority.”