Drone Mission Planner for Volunteer Search and Rescue
A lightweight mission setup tool that lets volunteer search-and-rescue coordinators deploy a drone grid search in the first hours after a missing-person report, without writing code.
volunteer search-and-rescue team leads and county emergency-management coordinators
- Wind-aware grid search generator from a typed or drawn search area
- Auto-deconfliction so multiple volunteers' drones don't overlap coverage
- Live mission status board with battery, signal, and last-seen-position
- One-tap handover of flight logs and coverage maps to incident command
The paper's own demonstration is a Gazebo search-and-rescue drone mission; the methodology is finally ready to leave the lab and serve the volunteer SAR teams that actually need it on weekends
Active market with SARWASP volunteer drone network, DHS S&T drone SAR assessments, and NIST first-responder UAS challenges; DJI documents volunteer SAR drone programs globally.Building a Search and Rescue Drone Program - DJI ↗SAR WASP | Search and Rescue Drones ↗
Direct competitor Aquti/Ikwind markets nearly identical SAR sector, thermal, multi-UAV and corridor planning features; D4H, SkyeBrowse, and DJI Pilot 2/FlightHub 2 already cover adjacent ground.Search and Rescue Drone Mission Planning Software | SAR UAV Search Sectors & Thermal Search ↗Best Search & Rescue (SAR) software (2025) - D4H ↗
Volunteer SAR coordinators typically fundraise/grants and rely on free tools; DJI Pilot 2 ships free with hardware, and the closest pure-play competitor Aquti runs a 'Request a SAR Planning Demo' enterprise sales motion aimed well above volunteer budgets.Search and Rescue - DJI Enterprise ↗Search and Rescue Drone Mission Planning Software | SAR UAV Search Sectors & Thermal Search ↗
Drone adoption in SAR is a durable, multi-year public-safety trend (DHS/NIST programs, Arctic SAR demand up), but incumbent hardware vendors are moving further into mission planning, threatening small entrants over time.Building a Search and Rescue Drone Program - DJI ↗Drones paired with AI could help search‑and‑rescue teams find missing persons ↗
A no-code grid/sector planner is buildable but non-trivial: requires mapping, multi-UAV allocation, DJI/Mission Planner SDK or Litchi integration, and field-ready export; turning the academic Gazebo methodology into a volunteer-usable UX is the hard part.Search and Rescue - DJI Enterprise ↗