Servo - December 2014

20 SERVO 12.2014

Many people who go into cardiac arrest could be helped with an automated external defibrillator (AED), as well as CPR from someone who knows what they’re doing. Most of the time, unfortunately, an AED isn’t handy. So, why not turn a drone into a flying AED, and then send it to rapidly respond to emergency calls reporting a heart attack event. It’s a great idea, and its originator, TU Delft engineering graduate Alec Momont, has even built a functional flying prototype. But is it realistic?

There’s a vague belief with robots that just because something is awesome and technically possible that doesn’t mean it should be done.

In practice, there are all kinds of problems that are as yet unsolved involving drones that want to operate in urban environments. Namely, a drone needs more than just GPS to navigate and detect obstacles, and in most places, operation out of line-of-sight is both illegal and just a bad idea. Plus, landing next to panicky humans with six spinning blades of death could be a problem.

Momont’s defibrillator drone has not solved these problems yet. At the moment, it’s a speedy hexacopter that, according to The Daily Mail, can “get a defibrillator to a patient within a 12 square kilometer zone within a minute,” improving the chance of survival from eight percent to 80 percent.

The drones would live at central dispatching points and use GPS to navigate to the location from which an emergency cell phone call was made. The commercial version would cost about $19,000, and could hypothetically include all kinds of other handy things like insulin or oxygen. It also includes a camera and speakers, so that people at the scene can be instructed on how to properly use said things. Guess time will tell here ...

Recently, SRI spun out its electroadhesion tech to a company called Grabit, who was demonstrating an electrostatic gripper at RoboBusiness earlier this year.

Electroadhesion can introduce a “stickyness” in just about anything you can turn on and off whenever you want. It’s sort of like duct tape that comes with a toggle switch. The flexible bits are electrodes that generate alternating positive and negative charges, thereby inducing opposite (i.e., attractive) charges in whatever they’re close to (anything at all, conductive or not), thus causing them to stick. Like geckotape, electrostatics depend on a lot of surface contact to adhere well, which can be a problem if you’re trying to attach to surfaces that aren’t flat. Fortunately, Grabit’s “fingered” gripper is compliant enough to get around that issue.