Developing an underwater robot to save people from drowning(fraunhofer.de) |
Developing an underwater robot to save people from drowning(fraunhofer.de) |
> A mechanism for fixing the rescuee in place prevents lifeless bodies from sliding down as they surface.
That looks and sounds like a deathtrap. Does it really try to strap the person to a hospital bed, underwater...?
Won't that drown the person if the robot is too slow or malfunctions?
> Many swimming pools in Germany do not have enough trained lifeguards and in many places, this skilled labor shortage is even leading to closures.
> One reason for this is the countrywide lack of trained life-guards to watch over pools.
So the reasoning is: job training for lifeguards is not feasible (why?), so we should develop super expensive robots that local pools can't afford.
Honestly this sounds like a made up problem, used as an excuse to get public funding for a pet project. I wish science was open and not commoditized, as then projects and efforts like this (computer vision) could more easily find actually useful real world applications.
It looks like it folds two barriers against the sides of casualty to pinch them in place. I imagine that if you are not completely incapacitated, you can dodge or wriggle out of it. I would also guess that, given that it's supposed to be clever enough to spot an incapacitated casualty to rescue, it might be clever enough to stop trying to rescue you if you attempt to swim away.
> Won't that drown the person if the robot is too slow or malfunctions?
WRT rescuing unconscious casualties from dangerous situations, you start with the assumption that they will die if you do nothing, and could already be dead. With that in mind, who cares if this robot drowns someone halfway to the surface who would otherwise have drowned at the bottom?
> So the reasoning is: job training for lifeguards is not feasible (why?), so we should develop super expensive robots that local pools can't afford.
I agree with you on this point. I think there is something in having a system that can help spot swimmers in danger, but then leave the job of rescuing to actual lifeguards.
The problem of not having enough lifeguards is not that they cannot perform rescues, but that they cannot continuously observe the entire area and spot people in need of help. Apart from spinal injuries, a single lifeguard is perfectly capable of performing a rescue in most pools or swimming ponds (in much larger or more complex areas, like water parks or the sea, it might be harder to get to a distant casualty from any given station).
Another thing is that lifeguards prevent the situation that this robot is designed to rescue people from. You spot a swimmer in trouble, and toss them a float or a line. You spot a dangerous situation arising, and you take action to prevent it. You don't wait for them to sink to the bottom and pass out.
One would hope, but I wouldn't hazard a guess at that. It likely uses some type of ML/NN to spot an incapacitated person; there are a bazillion pretrained models that recognized people in images. I know of no models that recognize when someone is "trying to escape". I think that that would be quite a difficult problem to solve, except for possibly a number of panic buttons. But in general, guessing a person's intent programmatically is really hard.
Growing up anyone that could swim well was desperate to become a life guard. Well above minimum pay and for 16+ that's pretty good. Plus there's an aura about being a life guard that was incredibly interesting. You get to wear shorts and t-shirts all day too.
That being said I assume most of these upcoming life guards have disappeared to do a tiktok dance...
Yeah when I first read this article. I was thinking "Lifesaver". Cheaper and just as effective.
Meanwhile, even the most basic of prosumer ROVs (remotely-operated underwater vehicles) like the BlueROV2 costs almost $3000[1], that that's without including the fancy computer vision tech and/or acoustics features that they're describing in here, which probably won't even be able to take advantage of the economies of scale for spare parts like thrusters, etc. That doesn't take into account the eventual maintenance costs, replacement, etc.
There's some places where marine robotics offer benefits for replacing humans--deep sea diving, oil rigs, etc. But that only works because the cost of training and employing humans is so much higher, there's support equipment costs anyway, and the risk involved warrants it. I don't see any of those factors here making this likely.
[0] https://www.redcross.org/take-a-class/lifeguarding/lifeguard...
If they could do this for as cheap as $100,000 and 10% maintenance then it would sell out.
I think even with millions of dollars it wont work well enough to deploy.
Cost of just the cameras to detect drowning -
"The cost to install Poseidon will vary depending on the size, specifications and number of pools. The average cost to manufacture and install the system in a standard pool is between $150,000 – $350,000." - https://drowningprevention.com.au/#:~:text=Cost,pool%20facil....
Here's $6,000,000 for shark spotting using an easier tech -
https://www.zdnet.com/article/au8m-fleet-of-shark-spotting-d...
(A SMART drumline is a buoy that sends a sms when the hook gets pulled on - https://www.sharksmart.nsw.gov.au/technology-trials-and-rese...)
http://spotthedrowningchild.com/
And remember that as you said, pool drownings are exceptionally rare, so instead of knowing there's a drowning child in frame in the first 60 seconds or so, you're watching for 8 hours a day and probably won't see one all summer.
As an industrial controls engineer, I find myself constantly explaining that humans are pretty bad at being robots and robots are pretty bad at being humans. This seems like yet another example. People are really bad at paying extremely close attention to their entire field of view continuously; machine vision does that tirelessly for the price of a few watts of electricity. In this case, the underwater robot is helpless to communicate to other poolgoers and to the suspected drowning victim, and as a mass of propellers and PVC it's probably slower than a skilled swimmer. Others have expressed concern about being trapped in a potentially broken robot's grasp: robot actuators are bad at grasping squishy humans, but humans are good at that.
I think the greatest value in this system is in the cameras. A light and/or sound to notify a nearby human would make lifeguarding hugely more effective and easier. That said, I don't particularly look forward to camera-laden advertising zepplins floating over the local swimming hole.
If you pull off your necklace, it emits a screeching alarm, and you instantly show up as an emergency red blip to rescue. A decent enough Android smartphone costs like $20 at the low end.
Surely a pool or beach could force guests to rent and wear these for a few bucks (or waive their rights to being saved).
Another cool feature would be spotting people running on the pool deck and shining a projector on them or something then an annunciator telling them not to run.
What I like about this robot is that it could be used in pools that don't normally have a lifeguard. Residential pools are a big killer of kids.
I fucked right off when they smelled military contract $$$ and pivoted to become an ISO 9000 compliant house of drudgery and boredom where one was more likely to work on Word documents speccing a hypothetical robot than build the damn robot.
This is the kind of application I would've pulled every string I could to work on while I was there.
To reliably distinguish between drowning and breath-holding, you need to wait (or have more context)
This device (which has to come out through a secret underwater hatch and propel itself amongst people) cannot be faster than a lifeguard who has spotted the questionable situation and put themselves close to it before making a decision.