Software development for an UAV - Track, recognise, and call for help.

Hi, we're currently working on a project where we would fly an UAV above some hills, and country side, and look for people in trouble, then call the "base" with the GPS coordinates, snapshot, and a couple of other info.
And since it's a university project, we need to keep the costs down. Hence why the following question.

Do you guys thing it would be possible to use an Android phone as a sort of "relay", where we would send a photo from a DSLR, get the phone to record a GPS coordinate as it receives the photo, and then send all of the data through a 3G connection every, say 1, or 2 seconds ?

Sounds like a simple thing, reasonably cheap (certainly in comparison to the other available options, such as sending data through a satelite, or a relay on the ground, or even more expensive - developing the whole system on our own)



This is only a simplified info on the project we are working on. The whole thing is a bit more complicated, but this is what we want to know from the Android side of things. Is this possible?
If so, has anyone already done that?
Would we need rooting for that?
And possibly, what phone/tablet would we need for this?