Lockheed Martin [LMT] is equipping its Indago small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to help first-responders search for special-needs people who have wandered from home.
A lightweight antenna developed by Loen Engineering of British Columbia, Canada, is being integrated onto the five-pound, quad-rotor UAS to pick up signals from a radio-transmitter wristband worn by a lost person, Lockheed Martin announced April 27. Flight testing will occur over the next two months, and deliveries to customers are projected to begin by the fourth quarter of this year, said Dave Pringle, general manager of Lockheed Martin Procerus Technologies in Utah.
According to Lockheed Martin, the collapsible Indago can be stored in the trunk of a police car and deployed in less than two minutes. While Project Lifesaver International, a Florida-based nonprofit, already provides the tracking antenna to first-responders to use on manned helicopters, such aircraft are expensive to operate and hard to obtain, said Gene Saunders, Project Lifesaver’s chief executive officer and founder. Saunders said Indago’s quick response time will increase the chances of finding lost people with cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Autism or Down syndrome.
“Project Lifesaver, for a number of years, has been desiring and wishing and dreaming about having this type of capability,” Saunders told reporters.
The market for the antenna-equipped Indago could be significant. An estimated 5.3 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, and that figure is expected to grow to 7.1 million by 2025, Saunders said. An estimated one in 68 children have Autism.
To use Indago for such missions, police departments and others will need to obtain a certificate of authorization (COA) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a process that takes about 60 to 90 days, Pringle said. Although the cost of the antenna-equipped Indago has not yet been determined, the base price of the UAS is about $40,000 to $50,000.
Lockheed has been developing Indago to aid a variety of missions, including firefighting, precision agriculture and disaster-related search and rescue. Pringle told reporters that the company plans to unveil four new payloads and a new hand-controller for Indago at the Unmanned Systems 2015 conference in Atlanta next week.