On the evening of July 30, 2026, the research project RESCUE-MATE ran a field exercise on the Elbe at the DLRG water rescue station Hamburg-Wittenbergen. Drones, rescue swimmers, a boat, and an AI application for detecting people in the water were tested together under realistic conditions.
Netsody was part of the setup. It connected the drone, the devices of the people on site, and machines in a data center into one private network.
The Exercise
Up to six drones were in the air at the same time and delivered high-resolution aerial images. Up to six people in the water simulated persons in distress and were rescued again and again by a DLRG rescue swimmer and a boat.
According to the project’s report, the exercise had three goals: extending the dataset for AI training, a live test of real-time transmission and analysis of drone images, and tests of automated drone control that does not depend on where the operator is.
A Drone Is Not a Server
The last goal is a networking problem. A drone in the field is not reachable the way a server is. It connects through whatever network is available at the site, it usually sits behind NAT, and it has no fixed address. The same applies to the phones and laptops of the people on site. The data center, in turn, should not have to open anything to the internet for them.
At the same time, a drone is about the last device that should be broadly reachable. Whoever can reach its control interface can fly it.
Netsody’s Role
Netsody ran in three places: on the drone, on the devices of the people on site who worked with it, and on machines in the data center that took over computations too heavy to run on the drone itself.
All of them joined the same Netsody network. Each device got a stable address in that network and an encrypted path to the others, direct where the networks in between allowed it and relayed where they did not. None of the devices had to be publicly reachable.
This made it possible to access the drone remotely in real time, to send it mission updates during the flight, and to take over its control from a distance.
What It Shows
The exercise is a good example of what Netsody is built for: devices that belong together but sit in different networks, some of them moving, none of them supposed to be exposed. Access is defined by policy, so who may reach the drone is an explicit decision and not a side effect of being on the same network.
The same pattern applies well beyond rescue operations, from machines and sensors in the field to vehicles, temporary sites, and edge computing setups that offload work to a data center.
RESCUE-MATE is a research project on dynamic situation pictures and information flows for rescue forces in complex crisis scenarios. Our thanks go to all organizations involved in the exercise. Their names and more details are in the project’s report (in German).
Try it
If you have devices in the field that need to be reachable without being exposed, we would like to hear about your setup. Tell us on Discord or at oi.ydosten@olleh.