The paradise holiday Indian Ocean island of Mauritius is best known as a destination of exotic weddings and honeymoons.
In the last ten years, as the commercial drone market has opened up, Mauritius has built a volunteer squadron of wedding drones. These passionate ameteur pilots are mainly used to filming many weddings from the air to capture the outstanding natural beauty of the paradise island, and these are a well treasured memento from any event on the island.
With most weddings being around the beautiful, natural lagoons and coastal regions of Mauritius, the years of practice flying drones in these conditions have proven to be a strong asset to local voluntary clean up operations.
As Mauritius faces its worst ecological disaster in its history with a massive oil spill in one of its most pristine lagoons, these wedding drone pilots have mobilized themselves, as part of the massive volunteer effort happening on the island to support the clean up operations of the oil spill.
The large, Japanese iron ore carrier, MV Wakashio ploughed into a reef just over 1 mile off the main coast of Mauritius on 25 July on the largest barrier reef of Mauritius in the pristine Southeast corner of the island. After being dragged across the reef by well over 700 meters over the period of 12 days, the Wakashio split and began leaking oil on 6 August. As of 15 August, it is close to fully separating into two.
Mauritius does not have a Navy or Air Force, so relies on its police and National Coastguard planes, helicopters and patrol vessels, such as the MCGS Barracuda, that is now patrolling just South of the crash site as of Saturday 15 August 2020.
This has meant the hyper local aerial footage of the spill, which would greatly aid volunteer oil protection boom efforts could not be completed in a live and dynamic situation with the large, manned aircraft resources devoted solely around the vessel.
Drone pilots have been able to take advantage of their experience and skills piloting drones during weddings and kitesurf competitions off the pristine coast of Mauritius to help identify areas where the black or filmy residue of the oil spill may be heading, to co-ordinate with an on the ground army of volunteers who are fighting to save Mauritius’ beaches and villages along one of the most unspoilt regions of the country.
Their particular skills and local knowledge in piloting amid these tricky local wind conditions are helping the effectiveness of the local clean up operations.
In a video interview by local Mauritian newspaper L’Express, one of the local cleanup volunteers, Stefan Gua, describes how important the use of these volunteer drones in the cleanup efforts have been.
Drones are critical for any ocean economy
As advances in autonomous vehicles have advanced, this is opening a world of new possibilities for maritime drones.
Island nations often tend to have a network of small and outlying islands, some in the immediate vicinity, and others several hundreds miles away from the mainland. In the case of Mauritius, these include the coral atolls of Agalega, St Brandon, Tromelin, Rodrigues and the network of islands around the disputed Chagos Island Archipelago territory that was subject to a recent UN ruling and marking the first time that world maps had been changed in 19 years.
Servicing these outlying islands have often proven expensive using traditional technologies. For example:
- Port infrastructure is challenging to build at a distance and may involve dredging precious coral
- Airport runways for aircraft tend to be large and expensive to build and maintain - not conducive to the surround atols they are on
- Internet connectivity tends to be patchy with expensive undersea fiber optic cables
However, with major revolutions in autonomous vehicle and drone technologies in the past ten years, the cost of servicing such outlying islands could fall by over 90%.
Here’s how in three key areas.
1. Fleets of Autonomous Vessels
Coastguard vessels with crews are often used for missions to patrol waters for evidence of illicit activities or illegal fishing.
These can be expensive to maintain, polluting using diesel fuel, and sometimes risky to the crew on board.
Just as an Autonomous Drone completed the first tour of the Atlantic today, companies like Saildrone in San Francisco are building the largest network of solar-powered, autonomous patrol vessels.
These can be used for scientific missions using the more than 30 sensors on board that can sense up to 200 meters depth, and detect a range of critical scientific data, such as water chemistry, temperature, footage as well as even detecting the presence of fish and other marine life. Using advanced machine learning algorithms that have to be carefully calibrated with strong training data, Saildrone is being utilized by the US Ocean Agency, NOAA to complete many fisheries surveys which could otherwise not have been completed due to Covid-19.
2. Long-range airborne maritime drones
Just as island chains are interconnected across the ocean, many large and under-industralized countries are effectively islands of towns and villages across vast expanses of forests, fields and mountains. This can make transport links particularly challenging.
In Rwanda, to address these issues, the drone company of Zipline has been deployed across the country to deliver medicines by drones.
These small packages travel across the country and land in relatively small sites, not requiring large, destructive runways.
For many coral atoll islands, having new drone flight paths could significantly increase the quality of life for islands who have to wait weeks or months for even basic supplies to arrive by air or sea.
The lessons from Rwanda is that three factors were needed to open up the Drone Economy.
These were:
a) Clear legislation for drones setting out the key parameters
Air space in many countries is becoming more crowded, dealing with a range of flying vehicles just 117 years since humans learnt how to fly using powered flight. These include passenger aircraft, cargo aircraft, military aircraft, tourist craft, helicopters, seaplanes. All of these are piloted.
Adding un-piloted craft is complex, but there are precedents in other countries how to do this safely. This will become the fastest growing part of the aviation economy and small island states with far outlying islands are ideally positioned to become the global incubators and leaders in this rapidly growing new industry.
b) Air space mapping technologies
With any set of 3 dimension space, new technologies will be needed to keep track of many fast moving and small objects.
Software to help Governments manage cities for fleets of autonomous vehicles or drones, is now a multi-billion dollar industry in Silicon Valley, and attracts some of the hottest tech startups for the future, such as Verses, one of the leaders in the rapidly growing open spatial web market.
Such managed open source software can easily help Governments administer their airspace to and from these outlying islands, while safely staying away from large commercial airports, as this example shows.
c) Pilot and drone licensing and certification
Finally, a clear licensing and training program is needed to ensure the greatest safety for all citizens. There are many ways to understand risk of drones, from risk of falling, dropping objects, power failure, loss of control, autonomous compared with piloted drones, drones within eyesight of a pilot, cargo that a drone is allowed to carry, which drones are authorized so can immediately be tracked when one takes off. These are all large challenges, but ones that many other countries have faced and have addressed.
It would be prudent for many Island States to pool their resources and develop a common framework across a region, as there are often many regional groupings of island states in different parts of the world (most notably the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Caribbean).
3. Internet Connectivity with Drone Balloon and Satellite Internet
Often, many far lying island states have poor internet connectivity, which has been a critical economic accelerator in many parts of the world.
Traditionally, Governments have had to rely on expensive cable laying activities across vast stretches of ocean. Many of these Governments simply did not have the budgets to complete such projects.
In the past ten years, two technological revolutions have opened up new possibilities.
First, the use of internet balloons that were developed by X, the Moonshot Factory at Google GOOGL +2.6%’s parent company ‘Alphabet.’ This new spinout business, Project Loon has now deployed internet balloons to many parts of the world, and has been used to provide emergency relief efforts following major disasters - which is often the case for many low lying island states facing greater risk due to climate change.
The second technological revolution has been the range of internet satellites that are being launched. There is currently a race between Elon Musk backed Starlink, Jeff Bezos backed Project Kuiper, and the recently acquired OneWeb by the British Government.
These new microsatellites will bring a new era of disruption to local telcos by being able to offer near ubiquitous connectivity at a fraction of the cost of current expensive infrastructure that relies on expensive and cumbersome mobile phone cell-phone towers, that are often an eyesore.
A chance for Large Ocean States to become technological leaders
Over the next decade, many of these technologies are likely to see mass adoption around the world.
Whereas for many years small island states have been on the receiving end of technologies designed and developed elsewhere, reframed as large ocean states, these countries could now become the leading incubators of technologies that will define the next century of aviation.
In the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, it started with volunteer wedding drone pilots. Let’s see what the future holds.
Written by Nishan Degnarain | 15 August 2020
