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Comment by zero_k

6 months ago

Search And Rescue (SAR) is sometimes VERY political. We build long-range RC airplanes to help find boats in distress at sea on the Mediterranean [1]. As you might expect, we could do 10x better, with less resources, if the powers that be wouldn't make it impossible to e.g. launch from an island and return to an island. So we launch from a boat, because it's not national territory and they can't make it impossible.

Shameless Plug: If you wanna join, let us know. We definitely would benefit from better on&off-board image recognition. But there are many, less buzzword-y, challenges as well: designing, building & testing airplanes, training pilots, delivering planes & batteries (challenging due to Watt-Hour restrictions), remote issue debugging, etc.

[1] https://tha.de/searchwing/

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zero_k

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JumpCrisscross  6 months ago

In case it needs to be spelled out, the problem is Europe has a maritime duty to rescue [1]. Once rescued, it has a duty to consider asylum and take care of the migrants/refugees [2]. Essentially, once SAR identifies a migrant vessel in distress, the closest country is forced to admit them.

The duty to rescue means "a state cannot legally prohibit its vessels from rescuing persons at sea." This technically covers search. But some Mediterranean governments have taken the view that if they don't see the migrant vessel sink they don't have a duty to rescue.

[1] https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-cr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...

tacticalDonut  6 months ago

What email should I reach you folks at? I'm an ML engineer and have specialized in computer vision, both on edge and at hyperscale.

I'd like to help how I can.