Technology Report

October 27, 2026

NFRI Visual-Enhancement Thermal Camera

ASAN, South Korea — A thermal camera is supposed to be the one tool that lets a firefighter see through smoke. In a dense, smoldering room fire it often is not: thick smoke and the soot and gases from incomplete combustion can wash a thermal image out to a flat gray, hiding the person a crew is looking for. On October 27, 2026, South Korea’s National Fire Research Institute, part of the National Fire Agency, announced that it has put a handheld camera built to fix that into service at four fire stations across the country, where firefighters will use it on real fires, rescues and training through November 27.

The agency calls it a “visual-enhancement thermal imaging camera for firefighting.” It was developed with the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI), a government research institute. What the agency says is new is the processing, not the sensor. The camera works in long-wave infrared, the 8-to-14-micrometer band in which objects give off heat without any outside light, the band ordinary firefighting thermal cameras also use. KERI’s contribution is a smoke-removal image-enhancement method that runs on an FPGA (field-programmable gate array), a chip whose internal circuits can be reconfigured to run one specialized algorithm very fast. According to the agency, it cleans up every frame in real time, at 60 frames per second, with a delay of no more than one-thousandth of a second, so the firefighter is not watching a lagging picture. The agency says the chip was chosen to keep power draw and heat low enough for a small battery.

The result, the agency says, is that the outlines and details of people and obstacles hidden behind heavy smoke show clearly on the screen. In comparison images the agency released with the announcement, two unnamed commercial thermal cameras show little more than gray in a simulated extreme-smoke room, made by burning plastic foam and rubber, while the enhanced camera shows two mannequins standing in the room. The agency has not published test numbers such as detection range or image-contrast measurements, and the commercial cameras are identified only as Company A and Company B.

The trial unit is a second generation. The institute first developed the camera in 2023, and firefighters who tried it asked for something smaller. According to the agency, the new version is 66 percent smaller by volume, down from 4,475 to 1,503 cubic centimeters (about 273 to 92 cubic inches), and 64 percent lighter, down from 1,280 to 456 grams (about 2.8 pounds to 1 pound). It has a detachable handle, an IP67 rating, meaning it is sealed against dust and can survive brief immersion in water, and controls the agency says can be worked by feel while wearing thick firefighting gloves. Agency images show a rectangular body with a screen and two large buttons that can be carried with or without its pistol grip.

“Securing visibility even one second sooner at a fire scene filled with dense smoke is key to protecting firefighters and to securing the golden hour for rescuing people,” said Kim Yeon-sang, head of the institute. He said the trial will be used to check how useful the camera is in the field.

The four stations were chosen for their call volume and training schedules, the agency says, but it has not named them. Firefighters will rate the camera on mobility, ease of use and the quality of the enhanced image, and the institute says that feedback will shape a final design and a planned wider rollout. The agency has not said who would manufacture the camera, what it would cost, how long its battery lasts or when a national rollout might begin.

October 23, 2026

tmsuk Water-Discharge Robot

FUKUTSU, Japan — When fires broke out in Wajima after the January 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, firefighters faced a problem no hose could fix: parts of the burning city lay inside a zone where a tsunami warning was in effect, and crews had to fight fire in areas expected to flood. On October 23, 2026, the Kyoto robot maker tmsuk unveiled a prototype built for that situation, a remote-controlled water-discharge robot small enough to fit down a narrow side street and to ride to a fire on vehicles a fire department already owns. It was shown at Fukutsu Fire Station in Fukuoka Prefecture.

The machine’s Japanese name translates roughly as “small unmanned mobile water-discharge robot.” It was developed with the Munakata District Fire Department, which covers the coastal cities of Munakata and Fukutsu, and with Hisanori Amano, a former senior researcher at the Fire Research Center of the Fire and Disaster Management Agency’s Fire and Disaster Management College who now heads the robotics department at Tokushima Bunri University. The project was selected under the agency’s Fire and Disaster Management Science and Technology Research Promotion Program, a competitive research fund, in its fiscal 2025 call. According to tmsuk, the agency issued that call specifically to address firefighting in tsunami-warning areas after the Wajima fire.

What tmsuk says sets the robot apart is its size and how it handles hose. Most of the work is done by a water cannon, the large swiveling nozzle firefighters call a monitor, mounted on a four-wheeled chassis. The company says the nozzle can aim up, down, left and right and can sweep back and forth across a set angle on its own. Water comes from a fire engine through a hose connected at the rear, a TNC reporter explained on site. The robot also carries a hose box with several lengths of hose, so it can drive forward with the line still attached and extend its reach without a firefighter walking beside it to connect sections. To keep the robot from being damaged by the heat, it sprays itself with a protective water mist, which tmsuk says also lets it serve as a long-running unmanned nozzle so firefighters no longer have to hold a hose for hours and can turn to rescue and evacuation.

According to the release, the prototype is 1.5 meters (about 4 feet 11 inches) tall, 1.0 meter (3 feet 3 inches) wide and 1.7 meters (5 feet 7 inches) long, and weighs 460 kilograms (about 1,010 pounds) with its hose box. NHK reported the weight as about 430 kilograms. The company says the weight and suspension are what let the robot stay put while firing water in any direction, and that its large tires relative to its size help it cross rough ground. It runs on a 48-volt, 60-amp-hour lithium iron phosphate battery, carries five cameras, and is driven by an operator with a wireless controller over a local Wi-Fi link.

Size was a deliberate choice. “If it were big, it would be hard to get it to a disaster site right away when something happens,” a tmsuk director told the Fukuoka broadcaster TNC (TV Nishinippon). “At this size, it can go straight onto the transport vehicles a fire department already has.” The station also reported that, despite its many functions, firefighters can learn to operate it in a few hours. In the demonstration, firefighters ran the robot by remote control against a simulated fire at a site where hazardous substances could be released.

The robot comes from one of Japan’s longest-running disaster-robot programs. tmsuk says it began building rescue robots after the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake in Kobe, when the Kitakyushu City Fire Department, which had sent crews to the disaster, asked for a machine that could work in places where secondary collapse made rescue too dangerous for people. That request led to the company’s Enryu series of heavy rescue robots.

This is a prototype, not a product. tmsuk says it will work with the Munakata District Fire Department this fiscal year to bring the robot to a level ready for adoption, followed by trial use on real fires, with full operation targeted in about two years. TNC reported that the developers first plan to improve its heat resistance. The release gives no heat-tolerance rating, flow rate, radio range, operating time per charge or price. Longer term, the company says it wants to add AI so the robot can take spoken orders from firefighters and work on its own, with several units holding a fire line together. Those are goals the company has stated, not capabilities shown in Fukutsu.

October 22, 2026

Evolver DFR

Most police drone programs are assembled piece by piece: an aircraft from one company, a dock from another, flight software from a third, and the federal paperwork handled by whoever is left. On October 22, 2026, Drone Nerds, a division of the Nasdaq-listed XTI Aerospace, announced Evolver DFR, a package that puts all of those pieces, plus training and support, under one brand and one contract. The company is showing it this week at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in Orlando.

DFR stands for drone as first responder. In a DFR program, a drone parked in a dock on a rooftop launches when a 911 call comes in, often reaching the address before officers or firefighters do, and streams live video back to dispatchers and commanders. What Drone Nerds says is new here is less the hardware than the way it is sold. According to the release, agencies can buy a complete, multi-year program covering several locations on a single purchase order, with no recurring subscription fees for the contracted solution. The company contrasts that with what it calls traditional DFR offerings built around ongoing subscriptions.

The system has three main parts, each from a different maker. The aircraft is the Parrot ANAFI UKR GOV, a small quadcopter from the French drone maker Parrot. The release says it is Blue UAS approved, meaning it is on a Pentagon-vetted list of drones cleared for US government use, and that it carries wide and telephoto cameras with 35x zoom, a 640-resolution thermal sensor, AES-256 encryption on its radio links, and is FIPS 140-2 compliant, a federal standard for cryptographic security. The drone launches from and returns to the DBOX PRT, a climate-controlled dock from the company DBOX that recharges it between flights. DBOX says it built the dock specifically around the ANAFI UKR so the two work as one system in heat, cold, and rain. “We know a dock is only valuable if it is ready every time a call comes in,” said Dr. Linas Gelazanskas, DBOX’s chief executive.

The third part is FlyAura, public safety software from SkyfireAI. According to the release, it lets authorized users fly missions, stream live video, and share a common operating picture from a web browser. It integrates with TAK, the Team Awareness Kit mapping and messaging app widely used by military and public safety teams, and keeps a searchable record of every flight. SkyfireAI chief executive Don Mathis said the platform combines “AI-assisted mission planning, remote flight operations, and real-time intelligence,” and that agencies can either run their own programs or have SkyfireAI’s team operate them.

Much of the package is services rather than equipment. Drone Nerds says its team guides each agency from an initial needs assessment through coverage planning, site selection, installation, system integration, and training. It also helps agencies through Federal Aviation Administration approvals, including BVLOS authorizations. BVLOS, short for beyond visual line of sight, is permission to fly a drone farther than its pilot can see it, which is what lets a rooftop dock cover a whole district. Every program also includes Drone Nerds’ Always Flying program, which the company says provides expedited replacement aircraft when equipment is damaged, along with technical support and maintenance.

“Launching a DFR program involves more than purchasing a drone,” said Jeremy Schneiderman, interim CEO of XTI Aerospace and CEO of Drone Nerds. “Agencies need the aircraft, software, infrastructure, training, and ongoing support to make the system part of their daily operations.”

The release does not give prices, flight times, coverage radius, or the names of any agencies that have signed on. Claims that the system improves situational awareness and helps commanders avoid unnecessary deployments are the companies’ own. Evolver DFR will be at IACP 2026 at Booth 2761 from October 24 to 26, and the company is taking demonstration requests at evolverdfr.com.

October 20, 2026

Army Blood Link

Blood is among the most perishable things an army ships. It has to stay inside a narrow temperature band from the blood bank to the patient, and it is often needed most where trucks cannot safely go. On October 20, 2026, two Arizona companies, Delta Development Team (DDT) of Tucson and The Good Drone Company (GDC) of Tempe, announced a US Army contract to build a drone system for that job under a program called Army Blood Link.

What is new is the pairing of a cargo drone with a monitored blood cooler built to one Army specification. Drone delivery of blood is already established in civilian health systems, but this contract asks for a US-built system that can do it where ground transport is “unavailable, delayed, or unsafe,” in the companies’ words. It is a first award, not a repeat. The Army posted the solicitation in mid-September 2026 through its contracting office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on behalf of the XVIII Airborne Corps’ Joint Operations Innovation Outpost, and proposals were due September 21, according to the federal notice. The companies did not disclose the contract’s value.

GDC will supply two US-built prototypes of its hybrid VTOL cargo drone. VTOL stands for vertical takeoff and landing: the aircraft lifts off like a helicopter, with no runway, then flies forward on a wing like an airplane, which uses far less energy than hovering. Hybrid, in GDC’s description, refers to that combined design. The company says each prototype is designed to carry up to six units of blood. On its commercial version, GDC claims a payload of up to 55 pounds (25 kilograms), a range of more than 300 miles, and speeds up to 93 mph. The company is fielding that aircraft for freight in Kenya.

DDT supplies the part that keeps the blood usable. It will deliver six Delta ICE 2L Smart Blood Coolers, each holding two units of blood or blood products. The company says each cooler keeps its contents within the required range for three hours of flight in humid conditions, with outside temperatures from 15°F to 120°F. The coolers log temperature as they go and report it over Bluetooth and cellular links, so the medics who receive the blood can see whether it stayed in range the whole trip. That record matters, because blood that warms too much has to be thrown away.

The flying is meant to be simple. The companies say the system will be run by one person with minimal training, fly semi-autonomously along waypoints, and keep communications at ranges up to 30 miles. Waypoint navigation means the operator sets a route as a chain of GPS points and the aircraft flies it on its own, with a human watching and able to step in. The prototypes are meant to drop blood within 10 meters of a designated target, day or night.

Those are design goals, and nothing has flown under the contract yet. The Army’s notice called for a three-month prototype period with first deliveries expected at Fort Bragg, and it asked for systems carrying 20 units per mission. The companies’ six-unit figure per drone is lower, and they have not explained how the two numbers relate. Building on a commercial aircraft rather than a new design is the point, GDC chief executive Jake Vander Ploeg said: “The military is adopting commercial technology like our cargo drones to quickly test new ideas in the field without starting a full aircraft development program.”

“Getting blood to the point of need is only part of the challenge. It must also remain within the required temperature range throughout the journey,” said Montgomery Leija, DDT’s chief executive. Army Blood Link is part of the Armed Services Blood Program, which supplies blood products to US forces worldwide.

October 20, 2026

SOTEN Digital Twin

Teaching a drone to find a person in a disaster zone usually means a lot of test flights, and some of the conditions that matter most, such as bad light, wind or a damaged site, are dangerous, expensive or hard to repeat. On October 20, 2026, the Tokyo startup SpaceData and the drone maker ACSL announced (in Japanese) that they had taken search functions developed entirely in a virtual environment and run them on a real aircraft, ACSL’s Japanese-built SOTEN industrial drone.

The virtual environment is what engineers call a digital twin: a detailed 3D computer model of a real place that behaves closely enough like the original to test against. SpaceData says its team rebuilt the Sakai Town Drone Lab and Drone Field in Ibaraki Prefecture, including its research building, indoor test hall, outdoor flying field, netted flight cage and parking lot. The company stresses that this is not just a 3D picture but a model built for operations, where flight paths, camera field of view, object recognition and the effect of environmental conditions can be checked. The test scene includes the airfield, takeoff and landing spots, buildings, human figures and colored markers.

SpaceData’s robotics team built a model of the SOTEN in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a robot simulation program, and connected it to the same ground-control software used to fly the real drone. According to the release, commands such as takeoff, fly to a point, turn and land can be sent to the virtual aircraft, and the simulated camera feed is passed through image recognition with results returned to the operator’s screen. The companies say they are developing two search behaviors this way: one finds a colored marker, approaches its estimated position and hovers above it; the other searches for a person and hovers at a monitoring position while keeping a safe distance. Because weather, time of day, lighting, background and target position can all be changed in the simulator, SpaceData says teams can rehearse conditions that are hard to repeat in the field and narrow down what still needs a real flight test.

The new step is the hand-off to hardware. The companies say they confirmed sending commands to the real SOTEN, receiving its camera video and controlling its gimbal, the motorized mount that points the camera. They then ran the marker-search function developed in simulation on the real drone and, according to the release, completed a sequence of automatic takeoff, target detection using live camera video, and a decision to hover, followed by a manual landing. Person search has so far been described only as under development. The release is candid that the virtual and real aircraft do not yet match perfectly, listing video lag, camera angle of view, gimbal-angle conventions and radio conditions as gaps the team is working on.

Next, the companies plan to run the same marker and person searches repeatedly in both the simulator and the real field, recording sunlight, wind and GPS quality, and comparing flight tracks, detections, final positions, video and control logs. SpaceData and ACSL frame the work for defense, disaster prevention and infrastructure, and say disaster uses include locating people in affected areas. The release gives no detection accuracy, timeline or customers, and claims about safety and efficiency gains are the companies’ own.

October 19, 2026

Ayudag-6

For months, the way Ukraine pulls wounded soldiers off the front line has been on the ground: small robotic vehicles that crawl in and drag a casualty out. On October 19, 2026, Ukraine’s 92nd Separate Assault Brigade said a drone had flown one out instead. Video released by the brigade and the 30th Separate Mechanized Brigade shows a heavy six-rotor drone, or hexacopter, settling near a soldier in combat gear, who clips himself to a line hanging from the aircraft and is winched up and carried away. “Welcome back to Earth,” the operator can be heard saying, according to ABC News.

What makes it news is that this was a real casualty evacuation, not a demonstration. Casualty evacuation, or casevac, is the military term for moving a wounded person from where they were hurt to the first point of care. The brigade’s drone unit calls the flight a world first, and Euromaidan Press and the Kyiv Independent reported it as such. That is the unit’s claim, and no one has checked it independently. Four days earlier, the Associated Press described StarGate, a purpose-built stretcher drone from SkyFall, as Ukraine’s first aerial drone for evacuating wounded soldiers. The two claims are about different things. StarGate is a dedicated medevac aircraft that had just started front-line trials, with no results published. The Ayudag-6 is a general-purpose heavy-lift drone that was adapted for one mission and, by its operators’ account, completed it.

According to the drone’s maker, Gurzuf Defence, the soldier, an infantryman with the 30th Brigade, had held a front-line position for close to 500 days. His unit kept him supplied with food, water, ammunition, and medicine by drone. After he was badly wounded, a ground evacuation was ruled out. The area was mined and full of Russian FPV drones, the small first-person-view attack aircraft a remote pilot steers through a camera. Ground robots had been the 92nd’s usual tool, but they could not get through, and sending a team on foot would have been a deadly risk to the rescuers, the company said.

The method was improvised. The team first flew in a set of gear with carabiners, the spring-loaded clips climbers use. Then the hexacopter came in carrying a winch. Talked through it by fellow soldiers over the radio, the wounded man fastened himself into the harness, and the drone lifted him out to a safer position, where soldiers met him and arranged his transfer to a hospital. Specialists from the 92nd’s unmanned ground systems company worked with Gurzuf on keeping the aircraft stable with a person hanging beneath it, and a 30th Brigade operator flew it, Defence.Tech reported. The flight was watched over the whole way, with electronic-warfare protection to jam threats and constant monitoring of the airspace.

Gurzuf puts the mission at 1 hour, 14 minutes, and 36 seconds and 62 kilometers (39 miles) of flying. The company did not say how that distance breaks down, and the military did not disclose the date or the sector of the front. Ukrainska Pravda, as cited by the Kyiv Independent, lists the Ayudag-6 platform as weighing about 98 kilograms (215 pounds), carrying 70 to 90 kilograms (150 to 200 pounds), and having a range of up to 25 kilometers. Those are published specifications, not figures from this flight. Gurzuf donated the drone, which is named for its six motors and for Mount Ayudag near the Crimean resort town of Gurzuf.

The soldier survived. He is in treatment and rehabilitation and his life is no longer in danger, the 30th Brigade said. “This is a historic event, at least for our unit for sure,” said Napalm, a squad commander and programmer in the 92nd’s ground robotics company. He described it as the start of systematic work to make such flights regular.

The manufacturer is more cautious. Gurzuf co-founder Pavlo Feldblyum said the Ayudag was designed as a heavy, modular, multi-purpose platform, not an evacuation aircraft, and that dangling a wounded person under a drone in contested airspace is risky for the patient. Every such mission would have to be planned around its own conditions, he said. “Air rescue is a last resort when there is no other way to save a person.”

October 15, 2026

StarGate

The hardest leg of a battlefield rescue in Ukraine is often the first one: getting a wounded soldier out of a front-line position that vehicles can no longer reach safely. On October 15, 2026, the Associated Press reported from a field demonstration of StarGate, a six-rotor drone built by the Ukrainian manufacturer SkyFall to fly that leg with the casualty on a stretcher and no evacuation crew aboard. The same week, the company handed it to the 475th Separate Assault Regiment, known as Code 9.2, for evaluation under front-line conditions.

What is new is the cargo. Drones already deliver supplies, and ground robots have taken on a growing share of casualty evacuation in Ukraine. Casualty evacuation, or casevac, is the military term for moving a wounded person from where they were hurt to the first point of care. StarGate is built to carry the person, through the air. AP called it Ukraine’s first aerial drone for evacuating wounded soldiers. SkyFall has not published results from flights with a casualty aboard, and the regiment testing it says it is too early to judge.

The request came from the front. Last year, according to AP, the commander of Code 9.2, who goes by the call sign Flint, asked SkyFall’s founder for a safer way to get wounded troops out of hard-to-reach positions. In some sectors the zone under constant drone and artillery threat stretches 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to 9 miles) or farther. Vehicles moving through it are targets, so soldiers sometimes go in on foot. Ground robots struggle with mud, craters, and broken roads, rivers and mines can stop them outright, and they typically need two to three hours to reach a position, said a Code 9.2 commander identified as KVN. “Covering 10 kilometers in minutes would be a drastic change on the front line,” he told AP.

The numbers are the company’s. SkyFall says StarGate can lift up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds), enough for a soldier in body armor with combat gear, and that its enclosed compartment is built around a certified medical stretcher that a wounded soldier can climb into without help. The team stays in contact with the casualty during the flight, the company says. Cruising speed is listed at 65 kilometers per hour (40 mph), with a top speed of 105 kilometers per hour (65 mph). AP reported a one-way range of 15 kilometers, and SkyFall’s own October 17 release gives a flight range of up to 30 kilometers. Getting it ready to fly takes about 10 minutes, and the arms detach for transport. Optical and thermal cameras let it work at night, and SkyFall says it is designed for rain and snow.

A pilot flies it by hand. Control runs over two links: Starlink satellite internet and L-Link, a radio system SkyFall developed itself, so losing one does not cut the aircraft off. An onboard AI system is meant to keep it under control when GPS is jammed or spoofed, meaning drowned out or replaced with false signals. If both links drop, the company says the drone can plot its own route back to a safe area. SkyFall also says StarGate has kept flying after losing one of its arms. AP noted that the company has not provided data on how reliably it survives damage in combat.

Because the aircraft is flying into contested airspace, it carries its own defenses. SkyFall says an onboard jammer suppresses the video feed of attacking FPV drones, the small first-person-view aircraft a remote pilot steers through a camera. For threats that get close, automatic net launchers fire when an AI system, reading cameras, radar, and acoustic sensors, decides the moment is right. In the demonstration AP watched, a net snared an incoming drone and knocked it off course.

None of that is proven in service yet. KVN said his unit needs at least a month with the drone before it can offer meaningful numbers on how often it succeeds. “It’s a completely new method of evacuation,” he said. “It’s difficult to talk in depth about the pros and cons right now. We need to work with it more.” SkyFall confirmed the evaluation but declined to share results. In its release two days later, the company said StarGate had gone on combat duty with Code 9.2 and that its training academy had begun teaching operators.

SkyFall puts the price at $50,000 or more per system, depending on configuration, and says it aims to build up to 1,000 a month by the end of 2026. That is a target, not a delivery record. The company was founded after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and also makes the Vampire heavy-lift drone, Shrike FPV drones, and the P1-SUN interceptor. Forbes Ukraine and LB.ua also reported the debut.

October 11, 2026

Vine Robot

SEJONG, South Korea — For about two weeks this summer, Korean firefighters could not go inside a battery warehouse they had already put out. The danger was not the fire but what it left behind: tens of thousands of heat-damaged batteries that might set each other off if anything disturbed them. On October 11, 2026, Korea’s National Fire Agency said its National Fire Research Institute had sent in a soft “vine robot” from Professor Jee-Hwan Ryu’s team at KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and completed a reconnaissance of the interior that no crew or conventional robot could safely attempt.

What is new is the setting. Vine robots have spent most of their short history in laboratories and staged test rubble. This one went into a real incident, for a national fire agency, and it was picked for a reason specific to the hazard: it is light enough that moving across the floor would not set off the batteries lying there.

The fire broke out in August at the finished-goods warehouse of a factory in South Chungcheong Province that makes primary batteries, the single-use kind that cannot be recharged. According to the agency, the building did what it was designed to do. Reinforced-concrete construction, fire-rated partition walls, and automatic extinguishers on each storage shelf kept the fire from spreading through the building, and it was put out early. That early success caused the next problem. Of roughly 210,000 military battery packs stored inside, many had not burned but had been cooked by the heat. The agency says they were the same model as the batteries involved in the chain reaction at the Aricell battery plant in Hwaseong in June 2024, a fire that killed 23 workers.

The concern was thermal runaway. In a damaged cell, heat can trigger chemical reactions that release more heat, until the cell vents, burns, or explodes, and the heat it gives off can push neighboring cells into the same cycle. With that risk in mind, the agency barred anyone from entering for about two weeks after the fire was out, and crews could only watch from outside. The institute considered sending in a tracked robot or a four-legged walking robot, the usual choices for looking inside a dangerous building. It concluded that either machine’s weight bearing down on batteries left on the floor could start a new runaway.

A vine robot moves differently. Its body is a thin, flexible tube stored folded inside itself. When compressed air is pumped in, new material turns inside out at the tip, so the robot lengthens from the front the way a plant shoot grows, while the part already laid down stays put. Nothing has to roll, step, or drag across the floor, so the robot puts very little load on what lies beneath it and can snake through narrow gaps. The idea was introduced by Stanford researchers in a 2017 paper in Science Robotics. Ryu’s IRiS Lab at KAIST lists its version as a soft growing robot for exploration and rescue in confined spaces, and researchers at the University of Notre Dame and MIT Lincoln Laboratory have tested a similar robot in an engineered collapsed structure for urban search and rescue.

At the warehouse, the team set up a protective barrier outside the building. Operators in special protective gear steered the robot remotely from a safe zone while it grew into the interior, and the agency says it was able to confirm the state of things inside. The announcement did not describe what cameras or sensors the robot carried, how far it traveled, or what it found.

The institute says it will use the data from the mission to write a safe-reconnaissance manual for fires at large primary-battery sites, including military bases and industrial complexes, and to support the investigation into the fire’s cause. It also plans to feed the data into a disaster-robot development project that it and KAIST are jointly proposing to a national-security research program at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. That project is a proposal, not an award.

“We will take the requirements and difficulties of real fire scenes directly into robot development, and lead the way in advancing robot technology that keeps firefighters safe and supports their missions,” said Kim Yeon-sang, director of the National Fire Research Institute, in a statement translated from Korean. The government’s Korea.kr briefing room carries the agency’s release, and Yonhap and The Korea Times also reported the deployment.

October 11, 2026

iSAR

SEOUL — When a lost hiker’s phone has no GPS fix, or has been switched off, the network that phone last talked to still keeps a record of it. On October 11, 2026, South Korean carrier LG Uplus announced that it had used that record, together with its own knowledge of how its radio signals spread over mountain terrain, to shrink a simulated mountain search area from about 707 square kilometers to about 4. The analysis ran on iSAR, the Intelligent Search Assistance System built by SOLVIT System, a Korean radio-wave analysis firm whose name Aju Press renders as Solbit Systems.

What is new is who ran it. iSAR itself is not new; SOLVIT says Korean fire and disaster authorities have used it since 2024. This time, a mobile carrier ran it. A carrier holds exactly the inputs the method depends on: where each base station sits, which way each antenna points, and which phone connected to which antenna, and when. The demonstration took place around Unjangsan (Unjang Mountain) in Jinan County, North Jeolla Province. It assumed the two situations in which phone location usually fails: no GPS signal in the mountains, or a phone with its power off.

The starting point is the method rescuers fall back on today. A base station is the radio site, usually a tower or rooftop mast, that a phone connects to. Without a GPS position, the most that is usually known is the last base station the missing person’s phone reached. In the Unjangsan case, drawing a 15-kilometer circle around that station gave an estimated search area of 706.86 square kilometers.

iSAR narrowed that in two steps, according to the companies. A base station’s antennas usually point in several directions, and each covers a wedge of ground called a sector. Mountains block and bend radio waves, so the ground a sector actually reaches is patchy. Modeling the station’s location, its antenna directions, and how far its signal reaches over that terrain cut the area to 45.94 square kilometers. Adding the phone’s time-stamped connection records, the network’s log of which station and sector the handset used over time, cut it again, to 4.13 square kilometers. LG Uplus puts that at a reduction of about 99 percent. Those figures are the companies’ own, from a simulation they ran and described, and no independent test has been published.

SOLVIT’s product material describes the underlying method in more detail. It says iSAR first analyzes radio quality for each sector of the last connected cell, separating the area the signal covers from the radio “shadow” where it does not. It then removes parts of that shadow area that neighboring cells cover, since a phone there would have connected to a different site. Finally, it uses a model of how far a person is likely to have moved in the elapsed time, based on personal factors such as age, health, and experience, and on slope, trail width, and weather, to pick a priority search area. The company says it can also apply time-series inference, built on Monte Carlo localization and the mobility model, to the sequence of cells a phone used. Monte Carlo localization is a statistical technique that tests many candidate positions against the evidence. SOLVIT says the process is automated and needs nothing except the missing person’s phone: no special app or device.

The company comes to rescue work from defense. Korean coverage, including Newsis and Munhwa Ilbo, describes SOLVIT as a specialist in radio-wave analysis and simulation for the military that is expanding that work into civilian disaster and rescue. iSAR was a 2025 CES Innovation Awards honoree in the Smart Communities category. Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy designated it an innovation product, and SOLVIT says it went into service with Korean fire and disaster authorities in April 2024. In that earlier material, the company claimed iSAR could cut a priority search area to as little as one twenty-fifth of the conventional size, and produce a result in about 10 minutes, against roughly three hours for manual analysis by experts. The companies did not say how those earlier figures relate to the Unjangsan numbers.

“This demonstration is a meaningful case confirming that communication data can be used to protect customers’ lives and safety in situations of distress or disappearance,” said Lee Sang-heon, head of network pre-development at LG Uplus, according to Aju Press’s English translation. He said the company would keep validating the technology so customers can get faster rescue support.

For now it is a test, not a service. LG Uplus and SOLVIT say they plan more trials to check how accurate and practical the technique is, and will look at how it could be built into the search-support systems of Korea’s emergency rescue agencies. The announcement did not say when that might happen, what network data would be shared, or under what legal process. Businesskorea and Chosun Ilbo also reported the demonstration.

October 1, 2026

DRU Pod

TOKYO — After a big earthquake or typhoon, the cell towers that survivors would use to call for help are often among the first things to fail. SoftBank Corp. and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems say they have now hung a working cell site under a coast guard’s long-endurance drone. On October 1, 2026, GA-ASI announced a completed flight test of SoftBank’s Disaster Relief Unit pod, or DRU Pod, on its MQ-9B remotely piloted aircraft. A day later, SoftBank published the results: flying a circuit 3,000 meters above the coast of Kuroshio Town in Kochi Prefecture, the aircraft put a mobile coverage area more than 5 kilometers across on the ground.

What is new is the platform. The aircraft was a SeaGuardian, the maritime version of GA-ASI’s MQ-9B, owned by the Japan Coast Guard and lent to the trial through cooperation between that agency and Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. A remotely piloted aircraft system, or RPAS, is flown by a crew on the ground and can stay up far longer than a helicopter. SoftBank says this is the first time in Japan that mobile service has been provided from the air using a Japanese-designed and Japanese-built pod made for a large RPAS. That is the company’s own claim, based on what it says was public as of October 2.

“DRU lets an MQ-9B serve as a mobile network relay tower in the sky,” GA-ASI wrote. Its president, David R. Alexander, said the company believes “this capability will be of interest to many of our MQ-9B operators for disaster relief and emergency communications applications.” GA-ASI dates the integration flight to July 27.

The radio design works in two hops. On the ground, SoftBank set up a gateway: an LTE base station, the same kind of equipment behind ordinary 4G phone service, plus a frequency-conversion repeater. The gateway shifts the base station’s 2.1 GHz signal up to 3.3 GHz and beams it to the aircraft. Engineers call that leg the feeder link. Relay equipment in the pod shifts the signal back down to 2.1 GHz and broadcasts it to phones below, which is the service link. Because the pod has to keep both antennas pointed while the aircraft banks around its circuit, SoftBank mounted them on gimbals, motorized mounts that correct for the aircraft’s attitude in real time. The company says they kept tracking through the circular flight.

Outdoors, SoftBank measured up to 20 megabits per second downloading and 5 megabits per second uploading in a 5 MHz channel. SoftBank argues it is enough for what people need first after a disaster: telling family they are safe, and letting local governments and rescue agencies send photos and video of the damage.

Much of SoftBank’s account is about certification rather than radio. The pod was built in Japan to GA-ASI’s design data and quality requirements. It went through conformity checks on materials, manufacturing, and configuration, then thermal and electromagnetic-compatibility evaluation for integration. Ground and flight safety tests followed, confirming the pod did not upset the aircraft’s stability, handling, vibration, or existing systems. GA-ASI then granted airworthiness approval for the aircraft configuration carrying the pod. That approval is what let the communications flights happen at all.

The trial is one step in a longer program. In March 2026, SoftBank flew a DRU Pod on a helicopter off the same town. The work is funded as a research project selected in 2023 under the Beyond 5G (6G) Fund Program, which the communications ministry runs through the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

None of this is a fielded service yet. SoftBank calls it a verification trial and says it will use the data to refine the pod and work out how it would actually be operated in a disaster. GA-ASI notes that MQ-9Bs already fly with the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Japan Coast Guard, and have been selected by Canada, Denmark, Poland, Germany, Qatar, Taiwan, and India. Each of those is a fleet that could, in principle, carry the same pod. Military & Aerospace Electronics and Telecompaper also reported the test.

September 29, 2026

SPROUT Vine Robot

When a building collapses, the people inside are often reachable only through narrow, twisting gaps in the debris. Cameras on telescoping poles cannot bend around corners. On September 29, 2026, the University of Notre Dame described a robot that can: SPROUT, short for Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit, a flexible, inflatable “vine robot” that grows into a void instead of crawling through it.

A vine robot is a soft tube that lengthens from its tip as air pushes material outward, much as a plant shoot grows. Because the body does not slide against the rubble, it can snake past obstacles that would snag a wheeled or tracked robot. According to Notre Dame, SPROUT can twist around obstacles and extend up to 30 feet into narrow void spaces with a camera at its tip. The university says acoustic sensors distributed along the body could also help map a route through the debris, which would tell rescuers not just where a survivor might be but how to reach them. SPROUT is a different robot, from a different team, than the KAIST vine robot also covered in this report.

The work is led by Margaret McGuinness, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Notre Dame, and was developed with researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. “Every second counts when you’re trying to rescue someone who might be trapped after a building collapses,” McGuinness said. The university says the robot is meant to improve situational awareness, not to replace the people doing the rescuing.

Notre Dame frames SPROUT against the tools urban search-and-rescue teams already use: trained dogs that detect human presence under rubble, acoustic listening devices that help estimate depth, and pole-mounted search cameras. The Federal Emergency Management Agency maintains 28 urban search-and-rescue task forces for collapses, hurricanes, tornadoes and other disasters, the release notes.

Responders are part of the development. According to the university, the team has tested SPROUT with urban search-and-rescue professionals at a mock collapsed building in Massachusetts and is now working with Clay Fire’s regional search-and-rescue team in South Bend, Indiana, whose feedback is shaping how the robot is adapted to field conditions. Notre Dame says similar technology could eventually help assess damaged structures in conflict zones. The release does not give a deployment date, cost, or performance figures beyond the 30-foot reach, and the acoustic route-mapping is described as a capability that could help rather than one already demonstrated.

September 29, 2026

VAPRE-M2 and the 9-1-1 Robot Platform

Most emergency drone programs are run by individual police or fire agencies. In the Dominican Republic, the national emergency call system itself is adding them. On September 29, 2026, the newspaper El Periódico reported (in Spanish) that the country’s National Emergency Care and Security System, known as 9-1-1, had presented robots, first-response drones and artificial intelligence tools at LA Agenda Semanal, a weekly public briefing led by President Luis Abinader.

The headline item is the VAPRE-M2, which 9-1-1 described as a first-response drone able to reach a scene while emergency units are still on the way and to transmit information in real time. According to the report, the drone is tied into the system’s existing tools: geolocation of the incoming call, a routing feature called Ruta Rápida (Fast Route), and the dispatch of response agencies, so that crews have a picture of the situation before they arrive. The presentation walked through the whole chain, from a 9-1-1 call to the deployment of response units.

The system also showed a robotic platform developed together with Boston Dynamics, the US maker of the four-legged Spot robot, intended to support response agencies in scenes considered high-risk and to reduce the exposure of personnel. 9-1-1 also described urban video surveillance and artificial intelligence tools running on NVIDIA computing infrastructure to support decision-making.

According to what was presented, the Dominican Republic becomes the fourth country in the Americas, after the United States, Canada and Brazil, and the first in the Caribbean, to bring this technology into emergency operations. That claim is the agency’s; the report does not say exactly which technology the ranking refers to. 9-1-1 says its goal is a single ecosystem that links citizens, response agencies and technology to receive, locate, visualize, analyze and coordinate each emergency.

The report gives no technical specifications for the VAPRE-M2, such as its maker, flight time or range, and does not say how many drones or robots are in service, where they are based, or how many calls they have handled.

September 28, 2026

RECCO R9 on a Drone

After an avalanche, rescuers either walk the debris with a handheld detector, exposing themselves to the risk of a second slide, or wait for a helicopter. A paper in the proceedings of the International Snow Science Workshop (ISSW), which opened in Whistler, British Columbia, on September 28, 2026, describes a third option: the RECCO R9 detector flown on a small drone. The authors, from the drone maker Drone Amplified of Lincoln, Nebraska, the Swedish company RECCO AB and Juneau Mountain Rescue in Alaska, say the platform fills a niche between handheld RECCO detectors and helicopter-mounted systems.

RECCO is a two-part rescue technology. Small passive reflectors, with no battery, are sewn into many ski jackets, boots and helmets. A rescuer’s detector sends out a radio signal, and a reflector bounces it back, guiding the searcher toward a buried person. The R9 is RECCO’s current handheld detector. Traditionally the rescuer follows an audio tone that gets stronger as they get closer.

The main engineering problem, the paper says, was electromagnetic interference, or EMI: electrical noise from the drone’s motors, power system and electronics that can swamp the detector’s very sensitive receiver. The team says it built a payload with RF (radio-frequency) shielding to keep that noise out and to reduce the risk of misleading signal returns.

The authors call the result a “dual-mode” feedback system. A new digital data link shows the signal in real time and tags each detection with GPS coordinates on a map on the drone’s controller, while the R9’s original analog audio is kept so experienced rescuers can still “search by ear.” The drone can also fly autonomous grid patterns, back-and-forth lines programmed to cover an area completely, which the authors say removes the gaps and overlaps that come from people steering a search by hand and significantly cuts the time needed to cover avalanche debris.

The paper frames the system as a force multiplier that responders on site could launch quickly and remotely, particularly where secondary avalanche hazard keeps people off the slope. The published abstract says the presentation would include data on search speed and signal resolution at different altitudes, but those figures are not in the abstract, and the paper does not announce a product, price or release date. The proceedings entry is a short conference paper, pages 2477 to 2479, with Ralph Blumberg of Drone Amplified listed as presenter.

September 27, 2026

Exoskeleton Rescue on Table Mountain

Wearable exoskeletons have mostly been pitched to hikers, factory workers and soldiers. On the night of Saturday, September 26, 2026, one was used on a rescue in Cape Town. As Cape Argus reported the next day, Wilderness Search and Rescue (WSAR) in the Western Cape fitted an exhausted 47-year-old hiker with a Hypershell exoskeleton so she could walk down Table Mountain’s Platteklip Gorge on her own feet. WSAR described it as the first deployment of an exoskeleton on a rescue in South Africa.

An exoskeleton is a powered frame worn on the body that adds force to the wearer’s own movement. The Hypershell unit WSAR used is lightweight and battery-operated, worn around the hips and thighs. According to the report, it provides powered assistance with each step as the wearer walks, taking some of the strain off tired legs.

The woman had climbed the popular route with her family. By the time they reached the summit, the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway had closed for the day, light was fading and a long, steep descent lay ahead, so the family called WSAR before starting down. A small team, including a Western Cape Government Health and Wellness EMS paramedic, went up to meet them. “Once it was fitted, her steps became steadier and her confidence grew,” WSAR said. “With the rescue team alongside her, she was able to continue the descent on her own two feet, with assistance from the exoskeleton.”

In a follow-up report on September 28, WSAR told IOL that the device allowed the hiker to walk down with assistance “rather than requiring a stretcher evacuation,” which would have needed more people and equipment. The team said the outing gave it evidence that assisted walking is safe, and that as incident numbers rise it needs ways to respond “without unnecessarily committing large numbers of rescuers and resources to incidents that can be safely resolved with the right technology and approach.” WSAR added that the decision about which approach to use still belongs to the rescuers assessing the person and the conditions.

The reports do not say which Hypershell model was used, how many units WSAR has, or how long the descent took. Hypershell, a consumer exoskeleton brand, was not quoted.

September 27, 2026

EagleEye Tactical SAR System

Artificial intelligence that spots people or fires in drone video usually depends on a fast connection to powerful servers, which is exactly what a disaster zone or a remote forest tends to lack. A drone system built by a conservation agency in Indonesia is designed to work either way. On September 27, 2026, the Indonesian news agency ANTARA reported that Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni had praised the EagleEye Tactical SAR System after it won first place in the Military Drone Development, SAR and Disaster Relief category of the 2026 TNI Commander’s Cup Open Tournament, a competition run by Indonesia’s armed forces.

EagleEye was developed by the Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) of South Sulawesi, part of the Ministry of Forestry. According to the report, it is a drone command-center platform for real-time tactical monitoring that combines drone remote sensing with AI analysis.

What sets it apart, as described, is that it uses two kinds of AI processing. A cloud AI server handles high-precision analysis when an internet connection is available. A local edge AI agent, software running on equipment in the field rather than in a distant data center, gives faster analysis in severely affected areas or places with limited connectivity. The system is designed to let search-and-rescue teams switch between the two as conditions change, the report says. EagleEye also includes a Python-based nighttime image-processing module, analysis of video after flights, and low-latency distribution of tactical alerts, meaning warnings that reach teams with little delay.

The same platform is meant for forest and land fire management, according to ANTARA: monitoring hotspots and smoke density, identifying firefighters on the ground, and using AI to identify wildlife. “This innovation demonstrates that drone technology and artificial intelligence can be developed to support field needs, both in search and rescue, forest and land fire management, and wildlife protection,” Antoni said. He said he hoped it would be developed further and adopted more widely across Indonesia.

The report does not name the drones used, give detection accuracy or range, or say whether EagleEye has been used on a real search.

September 23, 2026

MSA G1 City Edition SCBA

When a firefighter goes down inside a burning building, the people sent in after them have to find them in smoke and darkness, often with little more than a radio call and a last-known position. On September 23, 2026, MSA Safety launched a breathing apparatus designed to make the firefighter easier to find: the G1 City Edition SCBA, which builds a locator beacon directly into the air pack.

SCBA stands for self-contained breathing apparatus, the air cylinder, regulator and face mask firefighters wear on their backs to breathe in smoke. MSA’s G1 SCBA has electronics powered by a single rechargeable battery in what the company calls the power module. In the City Edition, MSA puts its LUNAR Beacon technology inside that module. LUNAR is MSA’s handheld situational-awareness device, which combines a thermal camera, search-and-rescue functions and data connectivity. According to MSA, a firefighter carrying a LUNAR can now search for and locate anyone wearing a G1 City Edition SCBA, so the pack a firefighter already wears doubles as the thing rescuers home in on.

The search works through what MSA calls FAST, for Firefighter Assist Search Technology, a proprietary network that gives simplified directional information toward a firefighter in alarm status. Paired with the SCBA, the company says, the LUNAR can also show the pack’s air pressure and share alarm status and location through MSA’s FireGrid Monitor application, giving incident commanders real-time visibility when data or radio connectivity is available.

“Firefighters tell us that accountability and the ability to locate personnel quickly during emergency situations are among their highest priorities,” said Steve Blanco, MSA’s president and chief executive.

MSA also says the City Edition is lighter than the previous G1. It says a new cylinder retention system is more than 10 percent lighter than the standard G1 retention band and that a standard low-profile swiveling lumbar pad saves up to half a pound. Other changes, which MSA attributes to years of firefighter feedback, include thicker regulator and cylinder-valve controls for gloved hands, longer pull straps, a facepiece harness for smoother one-handed donning, and a display that continuously shows cylinder pressure and estimated time remaining. The company says the pack meets the 2025 edition of NFPA 1970, the consolidated US standard for structural and proximity firefighting gear. The release does not give a price, range for the beacon, or how quickly a LUNAR can locate a downed firefighter.

September 19, 2026

Tianmushan-9

HANGZHOU — When a fire ladder cannot reach a floor, the usual options shrink. On September 19, 2026, Hangzhou-based Tianmushan Laboratory and its joint laboratory with Beijing-based Tianxun Innovation formally released Tianmushan-9, a vehicle-mounted tethered flying platform meant to put a standing work surface outside a high-rise window or balcony and keep it there on power from the ground.

A tethered aircraft draws electricity through a cable instead of relying only on batteries. The laboratory says that is what lets the platform hover for a long rescue rather than a short photo flight. Official Chinese coverage and English reporting by The Yangtzeer describe a system in four parts: the flying rescue platform, an 800-volt high-voltage tether supply, a modular transport-and-command vehicle, and an intelligent mission-control module. Takeoff can be from an SUV roof or from about 30 square meters of ground, they say — less space than a conventional aerial ladder truck needs.

The claimed working height is up to 100 meters. The platform is sized for three adults at once. Coverage from China News Service and Tide News says it can also deliver tools or supplies, or carry break-in gear to floors a ladder truck cannot reach. Those figures are the developers’ claims from the release day, not an independent test report.

The release included a staged rescue. Black smoke was set on a laboratory rooftop. The platform lifted a search-and-rescue robot dog to the roof, held a hover on the tether, and later carried simulated survivors back to the ground. Tide News reported that the dog’s search software came from an artificial-intelligence platform at Beihang University’s Hangzhou international campus. Flight control during the demo was described as semi-automatic, with a pilot in the loop.

The hard engineering step the team says it has already cleared is continuous 800-volt power over the tether. After about a year of work, empty-airframe and partly loaded flights, and vehicle-mounted takeoff and landing, have been demonstrated, according to the China News Service account. A July stage review, the same coverage says, closed out overall design, structure, propulsion, flight control, high-voltage power, and the command vehicle. Rescue mission modules and how the system fits different emergency scenes were still unfinished then.

What the platform does not have yet is a finished certificate. Tianmushan Laboratory says the next work is wall-side flying and uneven loads, then closer runs with emergency-management authorities and fire-rescue units on the way to final certification, mass production, and upgrades. Until that finishes, Tianmushan-9 is a demonstrated prototype, not equipment a department can treat as fielded.

The release closed the laboratory’s first batch of thirteen “signature” low-altitude projects, Tide News wrote, and framed the craft as an answer to dense urban fires where smoke, limited ground space, and ladder height cut off ordinary aerial access. Hangzhou.net also covered the debut the next day.

September 2, 2026

Guardian II

HAMBURG — When someone goes over the side of a ship, the standard answer is to send a smaller boat after them, and that boat needs a crew willing to go into the same water. Zelim, an Edinburgh technology company, spent this week in Hamburg arguing that the crew is the part to leave behind. On September 2, 2026, at the SMM maritime trade fair, it unveiled Guardian II, a seven-meter fast rescue craft designed to be launched, driven, and recovered with nobody aboard.

A fast rescue craft, or FRC, is the small boat a large vessel carries for exactly this errand. The Safety of Life at Sea Convention, SOLAS, requires many ships to carry one and sets standards for how quickly it can be put in the water. The difficulty is that sending it out in bad weather puts two or three more people into the sea state that just took the first one, and a master who judges that risk too high may not launch at all.

That is the gap Zelim says the design is aimed at. “Our next-generation Guardian II design addresses several critical safety challenges, including the inability to launch rescue boats in specific sea conditions due to crew risk, the high crew burden from manual handling, and the need for quicker and safer recovery of persons or objects from the water,” said Sam Mayall, the company’s chief executive.

The first Guardian was shown at the same fair in 2024: an 8.4-meter aluminum hull with a 400-horsepower diesel driving a waterjet, 30-plus knots, and capacity listed at 11 survivors. Zelim called it the world’s first unmanned and manned remotely controlled person-in-water rescue vessel — the company’s claim — and said it came out of four years of development with input from the United Kingdom’s Maritime & Coastguard Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Guardian II is shorter and more adjustable. Zelim describes a patented seven-meter hull available self-righting or with a single-point lift, and offered with a choice of propulsion: diesel jet inboard, jet outboard, or electric. A single-point lift means the boat hangs from one hook, which is what most shipboard davits — the cranes that swing a boat over the side — are built around. Self-righting means it comes back upright on its own after a capsize. Capacity goes up rather than down, to a maximum of 15 survivors, and the company says the craft is designed for deployment from a ship in under five minutes.

Two Zelim subsystems ride aboard. Swift is a conveyor that runs from the water up over the boat’s side, so a casualty who cannot climb, or cannot help at all, is carried in by machine instead of hauled in by arms; the company says it is type approved. ZOE is the detection software, computer vision watching video for a person in the water. In April Zelim said Lloyd’s Register certified ZOE to ISO 21195:2020, the international performance standard for automatic man-overboard detection systems on passenger ships, after 90 continuous days aboard the cruise ship Ambition, with a 97 percent detection rate in simulated man-overboard tests. Zelim says the system is trained on a proprietary maritime dataset of more than 9.5 million annotated objects. Bolted into a rescue boat rather than a ship’s rail, that software’s job changes: it runs a search and reports what it sees to whoever is holding the remote helm.

“With its range of potential configurations, Guardian II can be tailored to suit the requirements of a variety of markets and applications, from inland waterway light rescue to cruise lines and full oil and gas installations, as well as everything in between,” said Stewart Gregory, the chief operating officer. “Combined with our Swift system and a focus on remote helm operations, Guardian II is able to offer a fully integrated person-in-water retrieval system, with the capability to launch and recover the craft, unmanned.”

What the craft does not have yet is a certificate. Zelim says it is now working through type approval under SOLAS, the process that confirms marine safety equipment meets international technical and performance standards. Until that is finished, Guardian II is a demonstration rather than something a ship can count toward the rescue boat it is required to carry.

The company expects interest from cruise, offshore, and commercial shipping, and also from coastal rescue, defense, inland waterways, and leisure operators. Its detection software already has a commercial order to point at: in March, Zelim announced a contract to put ZOE aboard four hybrid-electric ferries being built for British Columbia Ferry Services, with installation expected to begin in 2027. The boat is a larger request. It asks an operator to accept that the craft sent after a person in the water will arrive with no one in it.

SMM runs September 1–4 in Hamburg. Ocean News & Technology also reported the debut.

September 1, 2026

SOLION-100

HAMBURG — For decades, a ship that needed a satellite distress radio had one official path. In 2020 Iridium opened a second. On September 1, 2026, Furuno Electric and Iridium Communications announced the SOLION-100, a single terminal that uses that second path and also handles ship security and long-range tracking.

GMDSS is the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, the international radio safety net for ships. Under the Safety of Life at Sea Convention, cargo ships of 300 gross tons and up, and passenger ships, have to carry it. It is how a crew sends a distress alert, gets weather and navigation warnings, and talks to a rescue center.

What is new is the box. Furuno put Iridium GMDSS, the Ship Security Alert System, and Long-Range Identification and Tracking on one Certus 100 terminal. SSAS is the silent alarm a crew can send if the ship is under attack. LRIT is the position report governments use to know where a ship is. Those jobs used to mean extra hardware.

Iridium, of McLean, Virginia, flies a low-Earth-orbit constellation. Furuno, based in Nishinomiya, Japan, builds marine electronics. Iridium GMDSS entered service in 2020 after the International Maritime Organization recognized it. The companies call that the first new satellite GMDSS service since the system was set up. Because the satellites move over the poles, Iridium says the coverage includes waters that geostationary satellites miss.

The companies say the terminal is meant to carry a crew through a safety event. Iridium SafetyCast carries navigational and meteorological warnings. A single-button distress alert sends the ship’s identification, status, and position. Safety Voice is meant to let the crew speak with a rescue coordination center.

“The new SOLION-100 terminal for Iridium GMDSS allows us to strengthen our safety communications portfolio and provide customers with LEO satellite GMDSS technology alongside the Furuno navigation and communications systems they already rely on,” said Kiyoshi Furuno, head of the Marine Electronic Products Division.

Wouter Deknopper, Iridium’s vice president and general manager for maritime, said, “Together, we are giving shipowners and shipyards another way to equip vessels with reliable maritime safety communications, including in the polar regions.”

The companies said the terminal is for new ships and for retrofits. They expect retrofit units in late 2026 and newbuild units in 2027. Those dates are a schedule, not a shipping confirmation.

Iridium is exhibiting this week at SMM in Hamburg, September 1–4. The release lists booth Hall B6 Stand 313.

August 31, 2026

sMRT SHIELD+

HAMBURG — A personal locator beacon usually does one thing. It shouts to a satellite and waits. Wescom Group says the sMRT SHIELD+ does three. It calls the global rescue system. It calls ships nearby. And it can light up to tell the wearer the satellite heard the call.

Wescom will show the beacon at SMM, the Hamburg marine fair, September 1–4. sMRT is the electronics brand of Marine Rescue Technologies Limited, a Wescom company in Anlaby, East Yorkshire. The company presents the SHIELD+ as the first beacon on the Cospas-Sarsat 406 MHz network to combine that global alert with two-way digital selective calling. That “first” is Wescom’s claim.

Cospas-Sarsat is the international satellite system that listens for 406 MHz distress beacons. Digital selective calling, or DSC, is a VHF radio method ships use to ring each other with a digital distress. AIS, the Automatic Identification System, is the tracking broadcast that paints a position on a nearby chart plotter. Return Link Service, or RLS, is a short message back through Galileo. Cospas-Sarsat says an RLS-enabled beacon can show that the alert was received, located, and passed to government authorities. It does not mean a rescue has been launched.

Wescom says nearby vessels get an extra distress alert and an AIS location, and that the wearer can receive an acknowledgment. The sMRT product page lists 406 MHz, VHF DSC, and AIS in one compact unit, plus GPS and Galileo receivers, a 121.5 MHz homing transmitter, a strobe, an audible alarm, and a five-year battery. Those are manufacturer claims. The page is still marked Coming Soon.

The same page lists Class-M compliance with European decision ECC/DEC/(22)02, the rule for man-overboard devices. It describes visual notices through a DSC receiver and through RLS.

Wescom will also preview a SHIELD+ emergency position-indicating radio beacon, the float-free ship version, for early 2027. The company says that EPIRB will be the first fully compliant IMO MSC.471(101) beacon to put DSC, AIS, infrared, and Galileo RLS in one unit. MSC.471(101) is the IMO performance standard for float-free 406 MHz EPIRBs. That “first” is Wescom’s description. Boatnews describes the infrared as another way to find the beacon in the last phase of a search, and notes that published materials do not yet give DSC or AIS range, or the EPIRB price.

July 14, 2026

SAR4SaR

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — A small wooden boat is almost invisible to radar. Searchers then comb a lot of water. On July 14, New Zealand Defence Science and Technology said Seascape, the University of Auckland, and DST had that week put the first manufactured radar-reflector prototype in the Hauraki Gulf. The device folds. It has no battery. It is meant to bounce a satellite radar pulse back so the boat lights up in the picture.

The name is Synthetic Aperture Radar for Search and Rescue. Synthetic aperture radar is a satellite camera that uses radio, not light, so it can see through cloud and dark. The commercial name is Glint, from the Auckland startup Seascape. Earth-observation scientist Thomas Dowling and engineer Ella Fasciana built it with Defence Science and Technology, the science arm of the New Zealand Defence Force.

On May 12, 2026, the University of Auckland said Fasciana and Dowling are named on a patent with the university. Fasciana, co-founder and lead researcher of Glint by Seascape, told the university it folds to about the size of a pizza box. Open it, she said, tie it to the boat, and it reflects radar back to satellites overhead.

The reflector does not transmit. Corner plates of aluminum focus a radar pulse and send it back the way a corner mirror sends light. RNZ described the later prototype as two triangular wedges fastened back to back, foil lining the 90-degree corners — what Dowling called an “offset caterpillar.” On a radar image that return looks like a bright starburst. The university says software would scan the imagery for that signature.

Defence Science and Technology said Auckland Coastguard helped tether the manufactured unit to the Anchorite Rock wave buoy for about two weeks of satellite collects and a durability check. DST called that a shift from a science program to an engineering problem: make something durable and cheap enough to manufacture. A Royal New Zealand Air Force P-8A Poseidon was training nearby, the post said. Seascape’s Glint page still says the team is creating the reflectors, not shipping them. In May the university wrote that the company was in the middle of a capital raise aimed at commercialization.

Work started in the fabrication space at Te Pūnaha Ātea — Auckland Space Institute. Fasciana began with origami paper to find a shape that folded flat and still made corners. Computer models screened shapes. Dozens of prototypes were built from corflute, gaffer tape, aluminum foil, and tarpaulins. Early tests at the university’s Ardmore field station asked whether satellites could even see the things from orbit.

The New Zealand Defence Force wrote that the Royal New Zealand Navy then tested a prototype from HMNZS Canterbury near subantarctic Campbell Island. Auckland and NZDF both say the reflector stayed visible to commercial satellites in 50-knot gusts. RNZ reported that the units spun, which pushed the team to add stability. DST director Dr. David Galligan told RNZ the satellite snap showed bright spots on the water.

New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Centre covers about 30 million square kilometers, NZDF says. In 2023/24 it ran 489 searches. NZDF’s pitch is a smaller search box. Dowling has said the reflector would not replace emergency beacons or radios. Fasciana has talked about a low-cost backup for Pacific fishing boats, including boats whose 406 MHz beacon is broken. Radar satellites do not revisit as often as a beacon pings. RNZ quoted Dowling on a patchwork of commercial satellite data, and on using drift models for a position that may be an hour or two old. The university has also flagged false positives from ice and some waves.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment lists a Catalyst: Strategic SAR4SAR PhD from June 1, 2026, to May 31, 2029, delivered by the University of Auckland and Seascape. The Catalyst page names U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and Umbra Space as partners. Those are stated partnerships, not an independent test report.

June 2026

LunaSAR

ADELAIDE, Australia — A distress beacon has always been a shout. It cannot hear back. In the June 2026 Journal of Space Safety Engineering, researchers reported a prototype that talked — voice and text — on the same 406 MHz channel rescue agencies already use. Rice et al., JSSE 13(2), call it the first demonstration of that two-way traffic on the allocated distress band. The radio waveform is named Beagle. The project is LunaSAR.

406 MHz is the international distress frequency for personal locator beacons, EPIRBs, and aircraft emergency locators. Cospas-Sarsat is the satellite system that listens. Today’s beacons send a one-way SOS. LunaSAR is a research attempt to put a conversation on that same channel.

The hardware comes from Safety from Space, an Australian satellite-communications company. SmartSat CRC says the prototype was built with NASA’s Search and Rescue Laboratory. SmartSat calls LunaSAR a geolocation and austere-communications system for stranded astronauts. Safety from Space says it has been developing Beagle since 2018, on small, low-power radios meant for hard environments, drawing on mobile satellite research, U.S. Department of Defense tracking work, and Cospas-Sarsat.

SmartSat reported a demonstration co-funded by the South Australian Government through the South Australia Space Industry Centre. The Australian Space Agency supported the event through Australian astronaut GPCAPT Katherine Bennell-Pegg. RFShop Australia, a hardware partner, dates the live field test to August 28, 2025, at Lot Fourteen in Adelaide. SmartSat says Safety from Space showed simultaneous voice and text through modifications to the second-generation Cospas-Sarsat beacon standard, using operational search-and-rescue frameworks coordinated with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

The June paper reports that trial. The published abstract says the work is part of an effort toward standardizing LunaSAR as a possible piece of LunaNet, NASA’s planned lunar communications network. Test cases, the authors write, were based on inputs from the NASA Search and Rescue Office, which they say is observing the project. South Australia’s remote terrain stood in for a lunar analog. The demonstration used low-power radios tested with Galileo satellites that already serve the International Cospas-Sarsat Programme. That two-way claim is the paper’s. The full methods sit behind a paywall.

NASA’s Search and Rescue office at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, describes LunaSAR as a lunar concept. On its Goddard search-and-rescue page, NASA says the work extends Earth practice to the lunar surface and would use LunaNet as a backbone for rescue data. A 2021 NASA abstract by Cody Kelly put the end goal as timely distress indication for lunar-surface users, with performance modeled on Cospas-Sarsat. When fielded, that abstract said, LunaSAR would be the first dedicated search-and-rescue notification system on another celestial body. That is a research claim, not an operational service.

The satellites that already listen for 406 MHz beacons are a different project, MEOSAR, the medium-orbit layer of Cospas-Sarsat. LunaSAR is a beacon and waveform that tries to put two-way traffic on that channel. Cospas-Sarsat’s June 2026 supplement describes a separate two-way service still under development for second-generation beacons: canned answers to formal questions. That planned service is not a voice circuit, and Cospas-Sarsat does not present it as fielded.

There is no catalog to buy a LunaSAR beacon. NASA and SmartSat have said the research is also meant to help first responders on Earth. It remains a prototype.

May 25, 2026

LOC8

FLAGSTAFF — The drone flight is the easy part. Then someone has to look at the pictures. The Coconino County Sheriff’s Office is using software that looks at every pixel for a shirt color, Arizona’s Family reported. After a drone covers a search area, the office runs the photos through LOC8. If the missing person was last seen in red, the software hunts for red.

Deputy Paul Clifton, the assistant search-and-rescue coordinator, told the station the problem is not the flight. It is the pictures. “As opposed to looking at thousands of photographs with the human eye that fatigues in 10 minutes, we’re leveraging automation tools,” he said. His illustration — “Maybe it reduces the number of photos you have to look at from a thousand down to twenty” — is his estimate.

“I’m looking for red because we believe that that’s what the person was last seen wearing,” Clifton said. He told the station the software accounts for how light reflects off objects. If LOC8 flags something, he said, it gives searchers a GPS location. DroneXL, writing on May 25, named the current package Loc8 G2, from Unmanned Systems Research of Saskatoon, and said Coconino is pairing it with AI-capable Skydio drones.

The product exists because a search once missed a person who was in the photos. Commercial UAV News reported in 2020 that Loc8, pronounced “locate,” was released in 2019 after searchers went through more than 1,500 drone images and did not find the missing person. Weeks later they concluded the subject had been captured in several frames, partly hidden by evergreen, and was not identifiable from the air with the naked eye. Anthony Lockly, co-founder and chief executive of Loc8 LLC, told the trade paper that the industry had focused on the aircraft, not on software to read the pictures.

Unmanned Systems Research describes Loc8 G2 as a second-generation color image-analysis tool. The company says it works at the individual pixel and can put a flagged target on a map. Commercial UAV News said the algorithm scans imagery from drones, manned aircraft, and ground cameras against user-defined color palettes.

Coconino has flown drones since 2018, Arizona’s Family reported. The office now flies Skydio drones with obstacle avoidance from six onboard cameras. Clifton said that sphere of vision helps in canyons where GPS is poor. DroneXL wrote that the program began with two DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise aircraft and later moved to Skydio.

The sheriff’s office is also working with an unnamed company in Scotland to train models on Northern Arizona terrain, Clifton told Arizona’s Family. “Northern Arizona versus Southern Arizona, the context, the environments are very different.” He said the tools can re-analyze video from past flights. He also said the custom-training feature is still being tested.

A documented Loc8 case, separate from Coconino, came out of Moose Lake, Minnesota. The Moose Lake Star Gazette reported in March 2024 that drone operator Earl Bakke used Loc8 on about 1,200 photographs while searching wooded land for Gerald Knapp, 86, who had dementia. Bakke said that within an hour and a half the program identified a grouping of red pixels, and closer analysis determined it was the missing man.

The same idea — drone photographs, then software looking for a color that does not belong — has shown up on other searches. In January 2026, BBC Future described mountain rescuers in Italy’s Piemonte region using AI to sort thousands of drone images after climber Nicola Ivaldo went missing. The software flagged a red helmet. That was a parallel use of drone-photo AI, not Loc8.