OpenRelief creates a drone to be used in disaster relief

© Irina Matskevich - 123RF.com

© Irina Matskevich - 123RF.com

Help from Afar

We talk with Shane Coughlan about a crowdsource project that gives drones a humanitarian purpose.

These days, when you think of drones, you probably think of assassinations and police surveillance. However, the OpenRelief project [1] is developing a more humanitarian role for robot airplanes – gathering information to aid disaster relief. Using free software and off-the-shelf components, the project is well on its way to providing an effective toolkit at a fraction of the price of equivalent proprietary solutions.

OpenRelief came about when Shane Coughlan, the former Legal Coordinator for Free Software Foundation Europe, became involved in the post-tsunami recovery of Japan in March 2011. Coughlan recalls:

[We] were having quite a lot of trouble at the time knowing where precisely to send supplies and which people or groups in the rapidly evolving disaster zone were suitable contacts to help ensure effective distribution. This was far from a trivial issue, with cases of supply trucks being turned away from shelters due to lack of requirement or storage capacity, and other cases of breakdowns in the fairness of frontline distribution being reported. When you consider that we had just lost five hundred kilometers of coastline and we had hundreds of thousands of people in need it's not surprising, but it is something that needed addressing.

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