The escalating incidence of sudden medical emergencies has imposed formidable challenges on emergency medical response, especially timely medication delivery during the “golden window of treatment” in the early stages of the patient's illness. However, in large confined spaces such as underground mines, traditional medication delivery methods often struggle to reach the patient's location promptly, which significantly compromises the patient's treatment efficacy and chances of survival. Therefore, it is urgent to develop more efficient and flexible medication delivery strategies to address complex and changing rescue scenarios. To achieve efficient patient localization and emergency medication delivery in confined spaces, this paper proposes an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based search and rescue strategy. First, upon detecting an obstacle, the UAV dynamically adjusts its orientation toward the obstacle. Second, during the patient search phase, the priority of viewpoints within already searched areas and at the frontiers of unsearched areas is increased. Finally, through systematic patient search simulations and experiments using autonomous UAVs carrying emergency medicine, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed search scheme in terms of search time and search path length are verified.
Zhu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.