After accidents and disasters occur on the vast sea, the process of maritime rescue is extremely complicated and difficult, there is bad sea environment, instantaneous disaster, insufficient target search and detection ability and various uncertainties, which seriously restrict the timeliness, safety and accuracy of Marine lifesaving tasks. With the rapid development of information technology and intelligent technology, unmanned technology has been quite mature, unmanned equipment has boarded the stage of history and has received general attention in the military field. With the rapid development of unmanned equipment, it has been applied to many fields such as reconnaissance and early warning, enemy attack, target guidance and so on. Unmanned surface craft, unmanned aerial vehicle, unmanned underwater vehicle and other unmanned equipment can carry out diversified tasks such as material delivery, target search and identification, and search and rescue in a number of lifesaving missions such as lifesaving, maritime rescue and joint search and rescue. Focusing on the future, unmanned equipment, with its advantages of intelligence, clustering, modularization, large-scale and multi-functional, has broad application prospects in lifesaving missions. Strengthening the application research of unmanned equipment is of great significance to improve the combat capability of the defense and rescue forces in lifesaving missions at sea and saving people’s lives and property safety.