Redditors' Ideas

Basically a permanent or preferably swappable attachment for Coast Guard and other high availability emergency/triage organizations that operate helicopters that can captures high quality images of wide scale disaster areas in multiple ways while tracking, triangulating, and cataloging the quadrantes of points of interest.

Features might include:

-Multiple cameras to capture visible light, infrared, night vision, visual signal reception, etc.

-Passive SOS: will identify a Morse code dot dash SOS signal at any speed, add it's triangulated location to the catalog, and shine a focused flood light at the source for an acknowledgment.

-Active SOS: A beacon that transmits an infrared SOS broadcast signal that can be picked up by a cell phones camera. Then the phone and the helicopter make a handshake using the phones flash to uniquely identify the survivor. Also, generalized and specific evacuation details such as location of triage points if they exist, general direction of optimal safety, optimal mode of transport, urgency/prep opportunity, known hazards can be communicated too. Optionally, if reality permits features like this, the ability to collect survivors into larger groups as they make their way to safety while encouraging/suggesting real world tips/acknowledgments of what happening around them. Phones can be preloaded with warnings and acknowledgments of known resolved or unresolved emergency events along their path and to only be displayed if they linger at the site and offer directions to continue evacuating or assist it realistic ways.

-Infrastructure: Can operate and has priority on any cellular band, satellite, or any other high availability robust connection type. Operates on a distributed region independent processing architecture where data is streamed to a hierarchy of data centers to be stitched, processed, and interpreted. With built in redundancy and rapid switching so that transit time can be reduced but failing/compromised data centers can be cut from the processing pool with minimal impact on actual response.

-That focused flood light can have multiple uses too. It might be able to work like lidar but with visible light allowing it to communicate with/direct multiple recipients. As in it flash white at passive SOS senders after each repetition, project an alternating beam of red and blue at an emergency point to visually direct ground services in a compromised communication situation, assign colors to ground units and direct multiple units to different emergency locations simultaneously if communication channels are good. This can actually be an independent device that can be attached to more helicopters

-Can operate in different altitudes modes where it can cover a huge region in a very wide observation pattern before returning to base, being swapped to a fresh helicopter, then dispatched to regions of higher damage for more detailed mapping.