In the early hours of the morning on a farm just outside of Zürich in Knonau, a heavily pregnant cow broke through the fence to find a spot in the nearby forest to give birth. Hearing the commotion, local farmer Thomas Gersbach, ventured out to discover the mother with a newly born calf.

As the farmer attempted to bring the cow and its newborn calf back to the safety of the field, the calf took off all alone into the farmer's cornfield. After spending several hours unsuccessfully trying to locate the calf and with the window of time to find it alive closing, the farmer reached out to the local community for help.

Within 30 minutes, Auterion had a team out at the farm with a commercial drone used for search and rescue, inspection and mapping, equipped with a thermal camera. With a drone built by Quantum System in the air, the team from Auterion began searching the farm property for heat spots, using the thermal camera, which could be used to indicate the location of the calf, while directing the search team on the ground to check each heat spot simultaneously.

After quickly scanning the majority of the farm without any sign of the calf, the team focused on an adjacent orchard where the drone picked up a series of heat spots. The ground team searched the area and quickly came across the newborn and scared calf hidden within long grass at the base of an orchard tree to the relief of everyone involved.

To search the entire farm on foot would have been extremely difficult and time consuming, with the chances of finding the newborn calf slim. By using the drone, the search time was significantly reduced by accurately pinpointing areas of interest from the sky.

In this case of the farmer and the newborn calf, the use of the drone led to a successful rescue, saving the life of the calf. Typically a newborn calf can only survive up to 6 hours without drinking the mothers milk.

In terms of the broader application of this technology, we at Auterion are building the platform to scale the accessibility and the automation of these systems so their use for the search and rescue of both animals and humans, is widely available and easy to use.

Across the globe there have been over 700 documented human lives, and many thousand animals, rescued by drones. This is only one application of this new technology making a large contribution to society.

Learn more www.auterion.com

свернуть