Drones Will Be Everywhere Watching, Listening, and…Planting Millions of Trees?
More and more people are getting to know drones, and not just the military kind.
Drones were one of the hottest gifts over the holidays because they’re not only getting easier to fly (though not yet a no-brainer), they’re also pretty affordable. In fact, a toy drone recently crash landed on the White House lawn, prompting President Obama to call for more regulations (something the FAA is already working on).
While these aircraft show the growing accessibility of drones, they belie their true potential.
Drone with camera.
What is a drone? In the most general sense, it’s a flying robot with simple artificial intelligence onboard. Most toy drones have multiple rotors, are battery-powered, and carry a camera (or nothing at all).
But drones can come in all shapes and sizes, from a machine that sits on your palm to one nearly the size of a full aircraft. Some look like multi-rotor helicopters while others are more like airplanes. They can be powered by batteries, engines, even solar panels.
Crucially, advanced drones are able to autonomously fly pre-programmed flight paths, and limited only by weight, their payload can be pretty much anything you like.
Recently, for example, ten media giants, including the New York Times, Associated Press, and NBC, said they would test drones for news gathering. Drones may bring big savings for news organizations who rent helicopters for $1,500 an hour or own and operate them for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And they can go where reporters would rather not.
Amazon and Google, meanwhile, aim to use drones to deliver packages. And Matternet, an early champion of drone delivery, thinks they'll prove useful everywhere from the skies over gridlocked megacities to developing countries with unreliable and seasonably inaccessible road infrastructure.
Farmers are using drones to provide detailed, low-altitude images of crops.
Pending FAA approval of commercial drones in the US—which has been slow in coming—practical drones are likely to take off elsewhere first. Matternet is running its trials abroad, and DHL has been testing drone delivery in remote areas of Germany.
Meanwhile, a million-dollar United Arab Emirates (UAE) competition, Drones For Good, recently attracted 800 entriesfrom all over the world with a single aim—to find practical, positive uses for drones.
The competition's semifinalists are an interesting bunch. One group proposes equipping drones with a small refrigerator to more quickly ferry organs for transplant from donor to beneficiary. Another would use drones to discover and remove landmines by mapping minefields from the air.
And then there’s BioCarbon Engineering. The team wants to use drones to map severely deforested areas—then send them along a programmed flight path using an onboard seed cannon to fire nutrient-rich seed pods into the soil.
Their goal? Autonomously plant a billion trees a year by drone.
But even as drones are maturing, they still aren't perfect. Hurdles include inclement weather, payload capacity, power generation, and noise. And, of course, some regulatory agencies have yet to fully embrace the tech.
What obstacles present the biggest challenge to more ubiquitous use of drone technology; what are the most promising applications—and what uses (good or bad) has no one thought of yet?
Let us know what you think!
Image Credit: Shutterstock.com
Discussion — 3 Responses
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A few of issue with drones:
There are many areas where they will never be legally allowed to fly and in these areas live significant numbers of people. These areas will grow larger and be more common, not the other way around.
The interaction of drones with large predatory birds, this could lead to seriously injured birds who are protected species, or if the props are enclosed the birds will bring down the drone by exhausting it’s power.
Drones are not very energy efficient therefore they may need to be truck launched and only used for the last 100 meters to place the package on a doorstep. However many people are now getting secure parcel boxes that work very well for delivery drivers but are incompatible with drone deliveries.
Insect sized drones will be used for assassination and the only protection will be a cloud of guard drones, this is not as far into the future as some may hope.
There are technologies that can destroy the electronics of a drone at a distance, even if they are shielded. These technologies do not make a sound and can be covertly deployed in urban environments.
Over zealous guard drones, vandal drones that attack or overwrite advertising etc. Solar powered autonomous acoustic pestering drones derived from useful acoustic livestock control drones.
It helps if you ask a more abstract question, what will them impact be of a technology that is compact and able to extend the influence of individuals into 3D space and at a long range and do so anonymously. And the answer is in short, chaos, because, stupid, malicious and vexatious humans are common.
To remove the limits on the potential for innovation in the area of drones we will need to strictly control who can have access to them because they are potentially more dangerous than firearms. But people will not tolerate that so we will have chaos and a patchwork of laws and regulations to deal with the ever increasing numbers of ways that the technology can be misused. You can even have classes of drones as they can be easily converted, drone technology can’t be controlled, but people can be and there access to the technology can too. This applies to all technology, why limit any technology that has a a duel potential for good/evil, when the real problem is human behaviour? Perhaps strict control based on education, demonstrable skills, and need combined with psychological assessments and regular reviews is the way to go, for all such problematic technologies?
edit: “You *cannot* even have classes of drones..”
I like the BioCarbon idea.
To say, this is the real way humanity would teraform other planets, if it ever comes to that day. A line of thousands or millions of robots moving along continents, processing the ground.