A story bendable should like..... Drones, cornfields and thermal imaging technology.

Here:

BECKER, Minn. — A 6-year-old boy is safe Wednesday morning thanks to a massive search effort overnight that ended after a drone with a thermal camera spotted the child his dog in a cornfield north of the Twin Cities, according to a report from WCCO.

The Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office said Ethan Haus was found around 2 a.m. in a field not far from his home in Palmer Township, which is just north of Becker. The 6-year-old had disappeared late Tuesday afternoon and was missing for nearly 10 hours before being found.

Ethan was brought to a hospital early Wednesday morning. Authorities say he was cold overnight, when temperatures were in the low 40s, but otherwise OK.

Some 600 volunteers turned out to help search for Ethan, who went missing around 4 p.m. after getting off his school bus and running off to play with the family dog, Remington. After Ethan’s family couldn’t find him, the call for help was issued.

One of those volunteers, Steve Fines, who owns a drone imaging company, brought a drone with a thermal camera. The device spotted Ethan and the family dog in a corn field east of the family’s home that had already been searched by volunteers.

“If not for that drone, I’m not sure we would have found him,” Sherburne County Sheriff Joel Brott said.

Fines, whose company is called Fines Imaging, said that he’d never used a drone in a search operation before.

“It was a moment that was going to make his parents so happy, and vicariously we all felt that,” he said.

The county sheriff thanked all the volunteers and law enforcement agencies that responded to the search for Ethan.

“This truly was the epitome of a community caring for its own,” Brott said, in a statement. “To see the outpouring of support in such a short time period to come out and help find this boy and his dog is heartwarming.”

link: https://wgntv.com/2019/10/16/d...ing-thermal-imaging/

I saw the report of him being missing yesterday, and my heart sank. After a terrible day at work today, I saw that he was found, and that good news washed the cares of my day away!

Search and rescue is a really cool application for advanced UAVs.

Back when I was working arctic oil & gas projects, Lockheed came to speak to us to show their UAV technology for oil & gas. The UAVs had a chassis mounted camera system where you could slide off one camera technology and slide on a different camera technology that would connect to the UAV's bus. For example, darn near hotswappable going between FLIR AND LIDAR.

The pattern recognition algorithms they could apply were even more impressive. The target boxes they could automatically put around an object literally looked like they only removed the cross-hairs from the military version. They showed us an example of finding a polar bear walking on the snow/ice where you couldn't see it with the naked eye, but their algorithm detected it and put a box around it.

^^
Thanks that was interesting to me, and I am not an engineer! Impressive applications.

Was part of a search a week or so ago and we deployed a drone with a thermal camera. First time I was part of its use in a real world event. While sitting in the command post watching the live feed as we planned out search operations and other coordination was a huge game changer. The drone was able to clear high risk areas with minimal effort and no exposure to the ground teams of any hazards that they would of otherwise been exposed to. Amazing technology.

That’s awesome news. Unfortunately when a kid goes missing like that you think the worst. It would be super easy for a young kid to get lost and turned around in a corn field and not be able to find their way back out. I’m kinda surprised it doesn’t happen more often. I’m sure with the temps in Minnesota this time of year he probably wouldn’t have lasted long without the technology from that drone.

Good to see some positive drone news also.

good to hear a happy ending. But, damn, can no one write a grammatically correct headline anymore?
Drone using thermal imaging finds missing 6-year-old boy in cornfield.

Yep, See it all the time.

Why would a 6 year old boy be in a cornfield using thermal imaging? Maybe he forgot his iPad.

10 years ago mom was in a nursing home,

she wandered away one night after supper,
for forty minutes they checked the smallish facility .

then they called the sheriffs dept.

it was forty degree's out and the volunteer f.d. showed up also,

forty minutes later they found her curled up in a bean field.

it was dark enough by then that they were using flashlights.

they could have saved some valuable time with this tech