HUGINN ← back

FIELD REPORT Incident 2024-1147 resolved

One subject.
Twelve thousand acres.
Twenty-eight minutes.

A volunteer SAR team in northern Maine called Huginn into a search at 13:55 local on October 14, 2024. Twenty-eight minutes later the drone had what four hours of ground search hadn’t. This is what they saw.

Location
Allagash Wilderness, Aroostook County, Maine
Reporting agency
Volunteer SAR — St. John Valley
Drone
DJI Air 3S, RTMP to Huginn ingest
Conditions
Fog, 38°F dropping to 28°F overnight
Search area
~12,000 acres
Subject
Day hiker, 67, last seen ~07:40
Aerial drone frame showing two detection bounding boxes — a signal-orange box labeled 'HUMAN FORM — 0.91 conf — claude vision' over a rocky cliff face, and an amber box labeled 'ORANGE — 0.73 conf — yolo' lower-right.
FRAME 14:23:08.260 What the operator saw the moment Claude Vision confirmed the YOLO hit. The smaller amber box, picked up later in the same scan, became the second confirming signal — a jacket, twelve metres west.

Timeline

  1. 07:42Subject’s vehicle reported abandoned at Allagash Lake trailhead.
  2. 11:15Sheriff’s office requests volunteer SAR assistance.
  3. 13:08Ground search begins along the marked trail and adjoining ridgeline.
  4. 13:55DJI Air 3S launched to scan secondary clearings. Huginn ingest active.
  5. 14:23First detection. YOLO flags a faint human form, 0.42 confidence. Claude Vision re-evaluates the same frame and returns 0.91.
  6. 14:24OCR pulls coordinates off the drone’s overlay: 44.7831°N  69.9542°W  ±3m.
  7. 14:25Position resolved to 2.4 mi NW of trailhead, off-trail clearing in dense spruce.
  8. 14:42Ground team reaches detection coordinates.
  9. 14:54Subject located, conscious, mild hypothermia. Sitting against a downed birch.
  10. 16:21Subject transported back to trailhead by ground team and ATV.
  11. 16:55Operation closes.

Detection log

What Huginn wrote to the session ledger between 14:23:01 and 14:23:14 — the thirteen-second arc from first scan to dispatch. Three sources, one find.

  1. 14:23:01.000 YOLO scanning sector 3
  2. 14:23:02.412 YOLO person? 0.42
  3. 14:23:04.118 CLAUDE partial silhouette through foliage 0.91
  4. 14:23:05.220 CLAUDE detection persisted across 14 frames 0.93
  5. 14:23:06.703 OCR 44.7831°N 69.9542°W ±3m
  6. 14:23:08.418 CLAUDE subject stationary pose-aware 0.89
  7. 14:23:10.044 YOLO orange jacket 0.73
  8. 14:23:12.502 CLAUDE jacket consistent with subject 0.91
  9. 14:23:14.001 ALERT incident 1147 dispatched to ground team

Outcome

28min Drone launch → first detection
31min Detection → ground recovery
2.4mi Off-trail distance to subject
>4hr Estimated additional ground-search time without aerial cover

Field note

We had walked past the location twice. The clearing wasn’t visible from the trail — a stand of black spruce drops off into a hollow, and the hollow is the kind of thing you don’t see unless you’re above it. He was sitting against a downed birch, conserving warmth, exactly where the model said he was. The drone saw what we couldn’t.

— Team Lead, Volunteer SAR — St. John Valley

Names, agencies, and timestamps in this report are fictional, composed from real conditions teams Huginn is built for routinely operate in. Coordinates are deliberately altered. Every detection in the log corresponds to a class the live system will return on a real session.

Request access for your team