TUSUR student Ruslan Shaido received a grant of 1 million rubles for the development of a system for searching for people in the wild. The future complex should transmit a person's coordinates even where there is no mobile connection, and the signal can be received by equipment on a drone or a separate base station.
According to the project author, the system is designed for forests, mountains, and taiga, where there is no cellular communication. Its task is to reduce the huge area that rescuers have to check and to shorten the search operation time from several days to several hours.
TUSUR reported that the team is creating a wearable tracker. It should transmit a distress signal and a person's coordinates. For rescuers, a separate receiving module is provided, which can be installed on a drone or used as a base station.
The project will be based on LoRa technology. According to Ruslan Shaido, it allows reducing the cost of production and certification of the device and making it accessible to a wide range of users.
Are there any analogues to the development?
The idea of transmitting coordinates via LoRa has been attempted in other solutions. For example, the open-source project Meshtastic allows devices to exchange messages without a mobile network or the internet. If a device is equipped with a GPS module, it can determine its coordinates and transmit them to other network participants. A smartphone is not required for data exchange between such devices.
There are also ready-made devices with a similar set of capabilities. In 2024, Seeed Studio introduced the SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E, the size of a credit card. It is equipped with GPS, operates on the Meshtastic network via LoRa, and has claimed dust and water protection for its casing.
The idea of using a drone to search for a person with a LoRa beacon has also been tested before. In June 2023, the authors of one experiment described a system consisting of a wearable transmitter, equipment on a drone, and a ground rescue station.