SoftBank has developed a technology that uses drones to detect cell phone signals of people buried in disasters

Japan's Softbank has now announced a new technology that can detect and lock the location of smartphones of people buried in sand and rubble through small drones.

This kind of drone can fly continuously for more than 100 hours and can detect the signal of a mobile phone buried at a depth of 5 meters. SoftBank said that in the future, it will consider adopting it in various fire departments to assist in the rescue of victims as soon as possible.

This is a system jointly developed by SoftBank, the Teruya Fujii Laboratory of Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Futaba Electronics, based on the Victim Location Identification System Using UAV Wireless Relay System developed in 2004.

The basic mechanism of this search and rescue system is basically the same as the traditional solution, but it adopts a wired power supply design. By flying the drone over the search site and simultaneously obtaining the receiving power of the radio waves emitted from the smartphone and from the radio wave installed on the wireless The downward directional antenna on the man-machine receives the position information of the drone from the GPS signal.

For this system, they built a dirt hill at the Futaba Electronics Chosei factory in Chosei Village, Chiba Prefecture, and buried a smartphone in it. The earth hill is about 200m away from the ground power supply device, and there are trees about 10m high and fences about 3m high in the middle. From the results of this demonstration experiment, its drone was able to reach the sky above the mound through the cable control of the auxiliary drone, and successfully identified the location of the smartphone buried in the soil and sand.