Earthquake! As soon as they hear the news, teams of doctors, humanitarians, and search and rescue crews are on their way to the damaged area to render aid. This is nothing new; it has been going on for decades. But what is new and newsworthy is the new, essential device that they bring to gather information as quickly as possible: rotordrones.
Flying a multitude of drones around a stricken city, like Nepal after April’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake, is useless unless there is a coordinated effort to gather information and quickly relay to the officials and emergency workers who need it the most. Patrick Meier has been an advocate of getting that information to a central databank that allows a variety of people easy access, and his organization, Humanitarian UAV Network, put people on the ground in Nepal to gather information from the air with small unmanned aerial vehicles. We recently had a chance to talk with him about the Humanitarian UAV Network and the organization’s very important role.
