TEXTILES.ORG
A group of six students from Guangzhou, China, has designed a concept called NET GUARD that’s a combination of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and cloth net for rescuing people from fires in high-rise buildings.
When the drone and net combination receives a distress signal, it uses GPS to pinpoint the location of the fire. Unlike fire engines, NET GUARD can avoid traffic and may reach the scene of the emergency in the fastest possible time. When NET GUARD arrives on the scene, the four sections of the UAV expand to reveal a safety net ready to catch a person forced to leap from a burning building. The net is made of a quadruple layer of polyurethane, which the students calculated to be strong enough to hold the weight of an average adult.
The project has been shortlisted to win the $13,000 Golden Pin Concept Design Award 2018. A news service about drones, Drone Below, cited the Golden Pin jury’s statement as “encouraging.” The jury said “NET GUARD is a rescue system that takes the jumping net directly to the people. The technical implementation still needs work with the help of engineers, but the idea has the potential to support the fire brigade with the help of a flying carpet. It has a high societal value. If possible, the mesh should be non-transparent to facilitate the access.”
Sources for this article include designboom.com and dronebelow.com.