This paper presents the preliminary development of a full scale, portable, modular, fully autonomous parallel wire crane that is intended to be used for rescue operations. This design is innovative in terms of flexibility for managing the location of the anchor points of the cables on the ground and on the platform, the possibility of partial platform location control through the management of the kinematics with less than 6 cables and the availability of on-board sensors allowing to possibly locate victims through thermal imaging and to transmit physiological data on the victims while they are still moving toward a safe area.