Flying Drone Would Find Victims Through Their Phones

Jul-21-14 Taking advantage of the fact that many people today always carry their cellphone, students have designed a drone that will use the phone's signal to locate victims of natural disasters.

Created at EPFL's Mobile Communications Lab, the drone will fly over the disaster area, where it will pick up the signal sent out by the phone's WiFi. The WiFi signal is very weak, especially when surrounded by debris and dirt, but by flying over the area a few times, the drone is able to triangulate the phone (and hopefully its owner's) location. According to Jonathan Cheseaux, who helped to create the drone for his master's degree, one key to the device's success lay in giving the system the ability to automatically ignore weaker signals from the calculations.

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[GIZMAG.COM]
[ACTU.EPFL.CH]

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