I was with small team from ORCHID attending the Fort Widley international Urban search and rescue exercise which revolved around an earthquake scenario (‘disaster city’ for grown-ups they call it). This exercise involved emergency responders from a number of countries performing a number of rescue missions including but  not limited to: 1. Digging inside tunnels to rescue trapped civilians. 2. Going inside collapsed buildings and breaching walls in search of civilians 3. Attending to people trapped under a collapsed road bridge.   We learnt a lot about command and control (and the basic systems they use for this – which are very low tech) and the logistics issues they have come across. These confirmed what we already knew in many cases but we could potentially access many datasets they have for various events.
We have some pictures that I’ll be putting up on the dropbox.
We were also lucky to talk to George Libby – the Hants Fire UAV person (pilot)  (he was in NZ for the earthquake rescue missions)- we discussed at length what it meant for him to fly a UAV and what are the regulations for this. In the UK, UAVs are not yet allowed to fly fully autonomously and go beyond line of sight of the operator – they can stay in fixed positions or fly back to base as  a security measure. In future this will change we hope. Quad/Hexa copters were not good enough for them they said – they can’t cope with strong winds – while their helicopter can sustain winds up to 45km/hr.
We were shown very interesting pictures from the UAV (including buildings on fire, floods) that exemplified how they would be used. However, it was not clear why we would need multiple UAVs – A single UAV is enough to provide situational awareness over the whole course of an emergency response exercise -e.g., to extinguish fire in a tall building – they only need reports every 5 minutes and a single UAV can do the job. 
Multiple UAVs/UGVs seem to be more applicable to military settings (and they had experience with this as well) and settings where there is a need to go inside a large building (possibly contaminated).
Right now, there need to be two operators for a UAV – one that controls it and one that looks at the video feed coming back from the UAV. You will see this in the video:
http://vimeo.com/53933224. The password to see the video is: uav.
We hope to talk more to the contacts that Nadia mentioned and probably invite people from Hants fire to come down for a talk at some point.