There are a few things that seems to really intrigue people to such an extent that they without hesitation cancel their plans or at least interrupt their immediate plans. Drones are an excellent example of this.

Today, friends from SAAB and Lindholmen Science Park organized a nice drone-seminar and demo at the Kuggen-building where we at Interaction Design at Chalmers have our offices. This meant that my morning plans were slightly modified since I was intrigued by the demonstration of one of the drone-platforms. The seminar attracted a diverse group of people including people from the local fire and rescue services.

My immediate impressions from the demo is that drones seems to have developed from being a nerdy-techie-hobby to now transformed into something much more off-the-shelf and consumer friendly. A fair bet is that drones will become a common sight at accidents sites and disaster areas in the near future. The capabilities of drones to provide overview using photos, video-streams and bulks of sensor data seems unprecedented thanks to is impressive in-flight abilities. It will be interesting to see which one of the three large fire services in Sweden that will start to have drones as part of their standard toolbox for response operations.

For all of you that are interested in drones for emergency- or disaster-response, have a look at “Humanitarians in the Sky: Using UAVs for Disaster Response“