Deploying Drones to Rescue Missing Persons... No Problem in Wide Rivers and Hills

Police Search Drones Flew Over 1,200 Times from June to September
High-Performance Cameras Scanned an Area 45 Times Larger Than Yeouido
Focused Deployment in Terrain Difficult for Personnel Search

Police drone for search operations.
[Photo by Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Lee Gwan-ju] Drones, regarded as the crown jewel of the 4th Industrial Revolution alongside autonomous driving and artificial intelligence (AI), are playing a significant role in public safety scenes. They are actively serving as the "eyes in the sky," quickly locating missing persons even in terrains where direct police deployment is difficult.

According to the National Police Agency on the 25th, the police have deployed a total of 38 search drones across regional police agencies nationwide, utilizing them for searching missing persons, rescuing individuals at risk of suicide, and emergency disaster response. Equipped with optical 30x and infrared 4x cameras, these search drones can fly continuously for 30 minutes and can be controlled from up to 3 km away on the ground.

Using these capabilities, the police are actively deploying drones for searching missing children and tracking individuals at risk of suicide. Over a three-month period starting June 17, the search drones flew a total of 1,279 missions, covering an area of 138.4 km², equivalent to 45 times the size of Yeouido. Through this, they found 356 cases of human lives or items that could serve as important clues for searches.

Search drones are mainly deployed in terrains where police personnel deployment is difficult. Rivers accounted for the highest number of deployments at 975 times (76.2%). This compensates for the inability of people to enter rivers and search along the water flow directly. Mountainous terrain (209 times), wide-open areas such as rice paddies and fields (73 times), and coasts difficult for personnel to access (17 times) have also become stages where drones actively operate.

On the 4th of this month in Chungnam, based on tracking the location of a suspected suicide individual's mobile phone, the police roughly located the area, then used the drone's 30x zoom function to identify a vehicle and eventually found the person in a nearby mountain. On the 9th in Gyeongnam, a drone deployed in a missing dementia patient case discovered the missing person who had fallen on a valley slope.

Techniques combining drones and AI are also advancing. On July 19 in Chungbuk, when a missing person case occurred, the police confirmed the main movement routes, filmed the search area with drones, and input the footage into AI analysis software, successfully locating the missing person. A police official stated, "The role of drones will become even more important at various disaster and emergency sites," adding, "We plan to utilize these excellent cases for life-saving efforts through dissemination and also plan to publish a separate data collection."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.