In dynamic humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HA/DR) situations, time of response and risk to first responders can be deciding factors in how effective efforts will ultimately be. Current, fully-manned solutions can take too long and put responders in harm’s way as they try to save as many lives as possible. Autonomous teaming, leveraging unmanned systems with onboard autonomy at the edge, can enable more robust responses to allow HA/DR teams to preserve critical human life and reduce injury risk – taking search, rescue, and emergency response into the 21st century.
With a growing global population living across more of the earth’s surface and continued climate uncertainty, particularly in sub-tropical and tropical climates, effective disaster relief is unfortunately becoming an even greater necessity for local, state & territory, and national governments as well as for non-governmental organizations. Currently, teams often engage in heroic efforts to locate, reach, triage, and safely evacuate effected persons from disaster areas and are often under-resourced and over-tasked, relying on sheer force of will and assuming increasing levels of risk to achieve their mission. Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HA/DR) is also often now performed by joint, multinational, or even military organizations given the critical shortage of other dedicated resources and life or death stakes across a growing number of disasters worldwide. Despite these efforts, the International Institute for Sustainable Development estimates that over 1.3 million people have been tragically killed globally by natural disaster over a twenty-year period, costing the global economy over $520B annually – highlighting just how critical more effective HA/DR is.
Within this context, response teams are often equipped with much of the same technology they have been for decades – namely personal protective equipment, simple navigation and location tools, and medical supplies. While this equipment has and will likely continue to make a critical difference for responders, there is a clear gap in bringing leading, emerging technology to bear to help responders do more, faster when time is most of the essence. Effected populations and responders deserve modern equipment and capabilities to help provide the best possible chance of successful response and relief. Governments and NGOs owe their stakeholders modern HA/DR response capabilities, formed through equipping their often under-resourced and over-tasked response forces with modern, autonomous, unmanned systems to help scale the impact of small, distributed teams in affected areas.
Rescue teams worked to safely move trapped citizens from their homes as extreme flooding hit Manila, Philippines from Typhoon Gaemi in July 2024. Critical response situations like this highlight the need for advanced technology at the edge. Photo credit: Reuters.
As a pathway to building these types of modern capabilities, the “autonomous teammate” represents the potential to bring emerging technology right to the critical edge in disaster response. To enable first responders to do more, faster, unmanned systems are a powerful solution to extend the reach of first responders and reduce risk to responding organizations. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) provide emergency personnel with the ability to reach hazardous or even totally inaccessible locations by today’s standards, removing the requirement for a safe or accessible “ground path” to areas of interest and enabling responders to access areas via the air with a greatly reduced footprint. UAS also enable responders to cover far greater areas of affected terrain, leveraging the speed, direct lines of movement, and advanced visual and infrared sensors organic to UAS to scale the reach and speed the process of emergency personnel seeking to discover potential survivors or individuals needing assistance. Extending from the core concept of UAS employment, employing UAS in teams at scale further transforms the paradigm for emergency personnel, enabling wholesale coverage and object detection across affected areas and creating a way to rapidly focus critical manned HA/DR resources on confirmed areas of interest.
UAS, like the OBELISK, allow response teams to quickly search large areas, identifying priority areas of need and potential survivors by leveraging surveillance intelligence.
Responders can access relevant information via intuitive UI, enabling simple route planning and clear, digestible output to inform search efforts and more quickly locate survivors.
While unmanned systems represent a powerful incremental improvement in HA/DR capabilities, pairing unmanned systems with autonomy at the edge enables truly transformative disaster response. In high-pressure situations where critical decisions are made at the disaster location, enabling edge systems to properly assess, communicate, and execute tasks shortens the decision loop, enabling more rapid support to those in need and further reducing the requirement for teams to move equipment and personnel over already strained logistical lines. Not only can teams utilize unmanned systems to access previously inaccessible areas or access those in need more quickly, but they can leverage autonomy at the edge as a force multiplier to increase their ability to influence critical situations many-fold. Systems that can not only reach critical situations but also understand and impact them are uniquely positioned to enable HA/DR and help save lives and improve outcomes.
Smaller UAS, like the YELLOWJACKET, can enter confined, interior spaces among rubble and collapsed structures, enabling responders to identify victims and prioritize rescue efforts without exposing their team to greater risk.
To achieve this type of impact, autonomy must be at the edge, given the strained communications and limited connectivity that are often the reality in the wake of a disaster. This type of autonomous teammate at the edge, intelligent and empowered to impact the situation, can be an unlock for HA/DR and emergency personnel by enabling the response to move from limited manned personnel that must incur great risk to autonomous, unmanned systems at the edge that can be projected to where they are needed most without incurring meaningful risk to emergency forces. The pairing of autonomy with UAS can be a particularly powerful multiplier for responders, removing the requirement for direct piloting and human management of aerial assets and further scaling both the reach & efficacy of HA/DR forces.
Figure 2. UAS and autonomy enabled HA/DR response can empower emergency forces to cover more ground, faster, and solve problems at the edge when it is needed most. Equipped with autonomous, attritable, compliantly-manufactured UAS enabling speed and decisiveness at the tactical edge, this scenario represents how an HD/DR scenario would be applied. Concept developed by Darkhive, Inc.
As part of Darkhive’s vision of “Autonomy for All,” the hardware and software ecosystem that has been developed for defense and public safety end users represents a potential strong fit for HA/DR use cases. The OBELISK and YELLOWJACKET Group 1 UAS are autonomous, attritable, and compliantly manufactured systems that present a credible capability for responders to free already strained teams from focusing on system preservation or piloting. Systems can be procured and deployed at scale, due to robust manufacturing capabilities and a truly attritable price point, enabling small, distributed teams to expend the unmanned assets necessary to rapidly scale response resources and mass them at the critical time and place during recovery operations. OBELISK features autonomous flight and mission execution, with automated object recognition on-board, enabling teams to direct systems to conduct critical search and assessment across wide areas without being constrained by where teams can actively reach or by the number of trained drone operators to man systems. The YELLOWJACKET is tailor-made for tactical employment, enabling rescue teams to carry the lightweight and easily hand-launched system into critical effected terrain, like interior urban environments, subterranean passages and tunnels, and rubble from collapsed buildings, and deploy the systems while on the move or while conducting other response mission tactical tasks. Teams can monitor & manage their UAS fleets through Darkhive’s ecosystem software, namely the FLEETFORGE fleet management platform enabling critical software updates over the air and timely fleet & status monitoring across UxS types. HA/DR response teams can reliably secure access to these critical unmanned systems, despite broader geopolitical challenges and flashpoints potentially associated with both natural and manmade disaster response, due to Darkhive’s approach to development & manufacturing, leveraging on, near, or friend shore production and compliant supply chains to ensure systems are accessible, at attritable price points and at the scale needed in critical response scenarios.
HA/DR first responders and affected populations globally deserve to be equipped with modern technology to enable more effective response, faster, when it matters most. Unmanned systems, powered by on-board artificial intelligence, are potentially critical accelerants of disaster relief efforts and represent a compelling application of technology already being fielded by leading defense, public safety, and commercial organizations globally. It is likely a matter of when, not if, response teams are augmented with the autonomous teammate for disaster relief, and Darkhive is ready to support the brave women and men of HA/DR forces and help equip them to provide critical support where and when it is needed most.
The OBELISK and YELLOWJACKET UAS are portable, easily launched, and maneuverable systems that can operate in impacted areas to aid disaster relief teams.
[1] United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) study on weather disasters, accessed 21SEP24. https://www.unicefusa.org/what-unicef-does/emergency-response/weather-disasters/tsunamis.
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