Environmental Requirement Assessment of an Unmanned Aerial System for supporting Life-Guards at Lake Constance

With the proliferation of unmanned aerial systems, the demand for systems supporting voluntary rescue services arises. In order to develop deployment scenarios and derive technical requirements for unmanned aerial systems for life-guarding services, logbooks documenting operations on Lake Constance between the years 1987 and 2010 of the life-guarding group of Nonnenhorn are analyzed. In this timespan, 212 operations are identified in which an unmanned aerial vehicle could have provided support. Technical requirements are derived by researching the character of the operations as well as environmental conditions during the missions. Besides the independent search, a deployment scenario to support the search in the proximity of the rescue vessel is identified. The latter scenario distinguishes itself by rather simple integration as well as little technical and training requirements.