Drone News & Articles

The 67-year-old Australian is still here, and he’s crossed an item off his Bucket List – to become a licensed drone pilot. Despite being diagnosed with a rare respiratory disease, Lyons thumbed his nose at mortality, joining a coastal, drone life-saving group.

Last month, the New South Wales resident completed certification to qualify as a Westpac Life Saver Rescue Drone pilot with Surf Life Saving NSW. Lyons joins 350 other life-saving, UAV training-program graduates who patrol Sydney’s northern beaches.

Surf Life Saving drone pilots conduct coastal surveillance, monitor surf conditions, spot marine species and assist with search-and-rescue operations.

“It’s fantastic. The course was just magic. They gave me so many tips that make it easier to fly drones,” Lyons said in a SLSNSW’s press release.

“If I can help someone, I can. I’ve got so many people helping me. I just want to give my time to help others. These guys go out and save people. I can help make their job easier,” he added.

“Surf Life Saving’s partnership with Westpac offers people a unique opportunity to become a surf lifesaver,” UAV Coordinator Paul Hardy said.

“We want to be as inclusive as possible and offer people the chance to participate and help save lives, even if they are unable to perform rescues in the surf,” he added.

Lyons’ wife Sylvia couldn’t be prouder of her husband.

“He doesn’t have the capacity to do a lot of physical exercise or anything like that,” she said. “He keeps his brain active and he decided to get a drone.”

“He’s reached this point which allows him to do a lot of things that can be beneficial to the community.”

Australia continues to innovate in public safety drones along its many beaches.

An Australian shark-repellent company is deploying the “Little Ripper,” a military-grade drone that costs around $180,000. The fixed-wing UAV comes equipped with a high-def camera and a detachable pod that can hold emergency medical equipment, shark repellent and an inflatable life raft.

A shepherd is out tending a flock when a presence appears above. It descends from the sky and communicates vital information. It may sound like a nativity scene, but for an increasing number of farmers it’s a daily occurrence – and that celestial being is a drone.

Corey Lambeth, a New Zealand farmer, originally purchased a drone for photography, but he quickly realised the device had more practical applications. “I thought ‘I’ll just give it a nudge on the sheep and see what that goes like’ and it actually worked out quite well,” he says. Now, Lambeth has been using a drone “pretty much as another dog” to muster sheep for three years.

New Zealand, where terrain can be rough and mountainous, is “perfect for drone technology … They have this purpose for them,” says Sam Watson, a drone pilot based in Australia.

“It’s a significant time-saving when mustering,” says Jason Rentoul, a farmer based in Marlborough, New Zealand, who has been using drones with herds of sheep, deer and cattle for three years. “Some musters might take four men with a minimum of two dogs each, and now [with a drone] you can do that with two men and considerably less time.”

It took a fair bit of experimentation to get to this point. Rentoul purchased his first drone after watching a video of another farmer using one to muster deer on YouTube. In the early days, he lost drones to water damage and once, memorably, while trying to transport a bottle of wine. He tied the bottle to the drone with fishing line, but it would “swing side to side”. The drone would try and correct for the wine’s movement “and the bottle would swing one way and the drone would try to balance” making the wine swing faster and faster, until he eventually lost control altogether.

“I [now] try and keep it fairly simple and low cost,” he says. Rentoul finds the drone particularly helpful when herding deer. Unlike a sheepdog, a drone can outpace a bolting doe. The drone also works well for cattle with calves, which tend to get aggressive around sheepdogs.

That’s not the only way his dogs have benefited from aerial assistance. “They work together, the dog and drone. It was surprising how quickly the dogs figured it out. At first some of the dogs didn’t like the drone and they’d snap at it and bark at it, but very quickly they realised that the drone was there to help them. When they’re casting out, sometimes they’ll have to run a kilometre through a gully to get to a flock of sheep … and they seem to find the stock quicker because they can hear the drone and know it’ll be working ahead of them.” The dogs will also stand under the drone when they’re feeling threatened by stags or cattle, “that’s their safe place … because the stock won’t come near the drone.”

Lambeth too has learned to innovate. After a period of successful mustering, his flock became habituated to the drone, and ceased to respond to its presence. So he got creative. He recorded audio of his dogs barking, and now plays that sound through the drone. “It’s quite a crack-up seeing the drone flying around, barking at the sheep.”

Wojtek Behnke, an English farmer based in Shropshire, is taking a different approach. Rather than using his drone as a sheep dog, he is treating it like a pied piper.

After watching videos of sheep being herded by drone in New Zealand, Behnke became curious and bought his own. Now, he’s involved in the world’s first “positive association” study using drones, being conducted by Harper Adams University.

Behnke separated a group of five sheep from his flock, and got them used to his drone. Once the sheep were happy, he started creating positive associations. He would hide behind hedges, throwing sheep nuts under the drone’s path. When the sheep had learned that the drone brought them treats, he introduced them back to the flock. “Within a couple of weeks I had all 100 following the drone.”

Now all 300 of Behnke’s sheep can be led by a drone over short distances. “It seems to be quite an enjoyable experience for them. I’ve seen ewes bouncing up like lambs into the air on the videos. They get quite excited about it.”

Behnke believes this can have an impact on the sheep’s quality of life. “We measure ‘a life worth living’ … [by] how many positive experiences they have throughout their lifetime, and how many negative. The more positive, the more their life is worth living. I imagine being chased by dogs and being pushed around is probably less enjoyable than following something around, thinking ‘Oh this is fun, I might get something at the end of it’.”

While drones make great companion tools to use with sheepdogs and other traditional ways of mustering, all the farmers spoken to for this story agree that the biggest advantage of using them is for monitoring. Drones act as an affordable set of eyes in the sky, making checks on stock and crops faster and more detailed – without having to disturb the animals.

Lambeth was particularly thankful for his drone one Christmas Eve. “Me and my partner were sitting out having a barbecue, and we could hear the cows mooing.” Previously, it would have ruined their night “driving out to each individual paddock to figure out where the water leak was”. Instead, “I sent the drone out and I could see their water trough had been knocked over. It only took me 30 minutes.” It was a modern miracle.

French drone manufacturer Parrot is getting on the First-Person-View bandwagon with the launch of the ANAFI FPV, a package that includes the ANAFI drone and a pair of FPV goggles.

The move comes a matter of weeks after DJI launched a bundle of drone racing gear. The Chinese manufacturer is expected to unveil a drone to go alongside the tech in the not too distant future.

So what’s new with the ANAFI FPV?

The first thing to say is that the ANAFI FPV is the latest in what will probably be a string of ANAFI iterations. The platform has previously been adapted for thermal imaging. We’re expecting further tweaks to be made for different commercial applications, too.

So essentially, the ANAFI FPV is just the original drone with a pair of FPV goggles.

Having said that, the ANAFI does have a few tricks up its sleeve that make it an interesting platform for first-person flight.

First is the immersive video from its 180-degree tilting camera. When viewed through the included Cockpit glasses, the ability to shift perspective to that degree is going to be interesting and has plenty of creative potential – particularly with the camera’s 4K HDR video, 21-megapixel images, 3-axis stabilization and 3X zoom. 

Parrot revamps the FreeFlight app for FPV fun

The ANAFI FPV comes with a pair of Cockpit glasses, which pair with your phone and the FreeFlight 6.6 app to give you a front-row seat at speeds of up to 31 mph (50 km/h).

Parrot says the ANAFI FPV’s new user experience “relies on a combination of cutting-edge hardware and intuitive software.”

The new FPV interface in FreeFlight 6.6 is a simple, streamlined heads-up display (HUD) with an immersive, unobstructed view of your aerial acrobatics. Any safety alerts or geofencing limits are automatically highlighted in your field of view.”

The main FPV HUD has been designed to be immersive, adaptable and informative. The standard HUD shows flight metrics, including speed, direction, altitude and location. But a click of a button on the Cockpitglasses switches to a minimal interface – removing the data and leaving you to the FPV experience.

You can even find your ANAFI in mid-air without removing the Cockpit glasses: Switch to See-Through View, and you’ll see live video from your smartphone camera. An overlay shows the exact position of your drone. If your ANAFI is off-screen, an icon points to its location.

Aerial photography meets FPV

As much as Parrot want to focus on the FPV element of this launch, the ANAFI was and remains a drone primarily designed for photography. But in theory, there are plenty of creative benefits that come with flying a photography drone in first-person.

For starters, total immersion in the on-screen image gives you a great platform to manipulate shot composition. Using the new FreeFlight app, Parrot ANAFI FPV lets you toggle through image controls to fine-tune photos and videos as you watch a scene unfold. 

FPV pilots can fly with manual settings such as shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and exposure compensation, a histogram and more overlayed, opening the settings using a button on the Cockpitglasses. 

Fast access to manual settings can also be set with the Skycontroller 3, which supports custom mapping of the right trigger to adjust exposure. 

Parrot ANAFI FPV: New Flight Modes & Presets

Rather than just adding a pair of FPV goggles to the ANAFI package and tweaking the app, it’s clear that Parrot has gone deeper with the new launch in terms of software.

Two new flight presets have been added which are designed to expand the pilots’ creative options. 

These are:

Cinematic preset: Capture smooth and dramatic footage inspired by flying in a glider. The horizontal axis of the 4K HDR camera is locked to the tilt of the drone. Footage is characterized by gentle banks and turns.

Racing preset: The horizontal axis is also locked to the tilt of your drone, but this preset is built for speed instead of smoothness. Videos will have a more aggressive feel as the ANAFI bobs and weaves through the air at high speed.

There’s also a new flight mode, Arcade Mode.

With Arcade Mode switched on, the Skycontroller 3’s left joystick controls the camera, which allows you to view in any direction. The right joystick controls the movement of the drone. By holding forward on the right joystick, the drone will travel in the direction the camera is pointed.

A New ANAFI Backpack

Parrot is also launching the ANAFI Backpack as part of the FPV package. It doubles as a stable platform to prepare and launch flights from. So no more worries about mud, water or whatever else clogging up your rotors. 

Parrot ANAFI FPV: Price and Availability

The ANAFI FPV All-In-One Pack includes the drone, one battery, the Skycontroller 3, one pair of Cockpitglasses, a 16gb SD memory card, a USB-C cable, one extra set of propellers and the ANAFI FPV backpack. 

It’s available to order today for $799 / £729.99.

City officials are backing a plan to allow drones to inspect buildings.

The move comes after an architect was tragically killed last week by falling facade from a building in Midtown, CBS2’s Dave Carlin reported Sunday.

“We need to get creative,” Councilman Justin Brannan said.

Some city council members want to lift building inspections in New York City to new heights.

They want to check for problems by air — not with helicopters, but with things much smaller.

“The city needs to embrace drone technology,” Brannan said.

Bills are in the works to mandate timely drone checks.

“It would require Department of Buildings to conduct an initial drone inspection within 48 hours of a 311 complaint or a DOB violation,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said.

The push to fast track the proposals are coming as a result of Tuesday’s falling debris death of architect Erica Tishman, as she walked on West 49th Street near Seventh Avenue.

“What happened to Erica Tishman appeared to be completely avoidable tragedy. Inspectors issued a violation back in April. Erica was killed in December,” Brannan said.

Drones can get in close where inspectors cannot and before costly scaffolding needs to be put up.

While other smaller cities can use them for building inspections, “Due to an outdated law, drones usage remains complex in New York City and our city has been behind there,” said Zachary Hect of Tech:NYC.

But some in the Big Apple worry about adding to crowded airspace, and the potential for drone-related terror attacks.

“I wouldn’t like to see it,” one man said. “I think it might cause some chaos and confusion.”

The speakers at Sunday’s event said the old 1948 law, which requires that all aircraft take off and land in a location designated for flight by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, essentially the city’s two airports, prevented them from doing a demonstration with a drone in the air. Instead, it had to stay on the table.

Inspecting nooks and crannies of City Hall, Carlin saw that the drone cameras detect heat and zoom in for views the human eye can’t see.

“You’d not only be able to tell if it’s about to fall, you’d be able to tell if there is water seeping in to it,” said Edward Kostakis of DJI, the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial and consumer drones. “City Hall is looking pretty in tact. It is stone. It is solid.”

Supporters of the plans said they hope Mayor Bill de Blasio and leaders of the Department of Buildings and NYPD voice strong support to boost the effort and see it take flight.

Building owners would be required to get the drone checks done with private companies, working with the Department of Buildings and NYPD.

It will be too late for Christmas, but the DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 returns to the official DJI online store in the 2nd week of January, next year. Eventhough the drone will be re-introduced in 2020, it will not feature ADS-B because technically it is not a new drone.

Finally DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 returns

After a few false starts, we have now been able to confirm this news through two different and independent sources, so we feel very confident that this is accurate.

DJI will be bringing the iconic DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 back to its official DJI online store for the price of $1,729 USD. We do not know for how long the drone will remain available and in what quantities. So, if you are in need of one be sure to put your order in as soon as it becomes available. We are under the impression that the iconic drone will also be available at official DJI resellers.

Recently we posted this article about DJI asking affiliates to review the DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0, which we viewed as an unofficial announcement that it would indeed be making a comeback.

Earlier rumors were that the DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 would have come back in September or October but that never happened as we all witnessed.

A hyperspectral remote sensing center is being launched to power precision agriculture, mining and infrastructure inspection applications.

From when to plant to when to harvest, farmers have a plethora of decisions to make. The agricultural sector is undergoing a data-driven transformation, and farmers are adopting data analytics and smart farming technologies to improve profitability and risk management. Remote sensing, which generates field-observation data from satellites, manned or unmanned aircrafts and terrestrial sensors, is now a backbone technology for precision agriculture.

The global agriculture analytics market accounted for $590.03 million in 2018 and is projected to reach $2.46 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 17.2%, according to ResearchAndMarkets. An opportunity that Headwall Photonics Inc. (Bolton, Massachusetts) and Geo-Konzept GmbH (Adelschlag, Germany) have seized with the creation of the Center for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Europe (CHRSE) for the development of airborne hyperspectral and lidar technology and applications.

At the plant level

There is no doubt that hyperspectral remote sensing can change agricultural production into a more sustainable business. Because it sees beyond the natural limitations of human sight, it can detect diseases early in the crop growth cycle and enable the farmer to take prompt and targeted actions.

But why is its adoption so slow? The main reason is that the technology is too expensive, and farmers don’t have a clear outlook on the return on investment.

“Hyperspectral imaging is not yet ready to be applied by a standard farmer,” said Johannes Kutschera, head of Mining, Remote Sensing Department for Geo-Konzept. Going back in history, “one GPS system cost about one hundred thousand euros (about $110,600),” he recalled. “Now when we talk about steering systems for tractors, you can get GPS systems starting at €5,000 (about $5,530).” Of course, it is taking some time, “but our long-term goal is to convert this technology into a tool that can be used by a standard farmer.” In the meantime, he said, “it will be our task to find applications where this higher value sensor can result in higher value for the customer.”

Another threshold to adoption, continued Christian Felsheim, European Area business director for Headwall, is the complexity of the technology. “That’s exactly what we, Geo-Konzept and Headwall, are dedicated to work on, […] to make the technology easier to use, and that will eventually bring the cost down. But that requires that you bring technology and applications together, and have a place where it is easy to try things and walk through applications.”

The CHRSE will support the implementation and utilization of hyperspectral imaging technology combined with other sensor technology such as lidar and high-precision GPS. “Headwall is a high-end technology company, and Geo-Konzept will be the bridge in transforming the high-end technology and bringing it to a level where it can be used by many customers in the fields,” Kutschera explained.

The new center will be located at Geo-Konzept’s headquarters in Adelschlag. The facility features large areas for unmanned drone flights and certified unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) pilots available to test and demonstrate hyperspectral imaging technology in application-specific environments and to train the next generation of UAV operators. In addition to all of that, it’s a farm. The company’s CEO, Thomas Muhr, is a farmer. And a lot of its customers are seed breeders with allocated field trial plots around the office.

“Individual plots are just one by one meter,” Kutschera specified. “Collecting information about every single plot is a very time-consuming task with a lot of manual work, and it is not very precise.” It merely notifies if the crop is “in good shape or not, whereas hyperspectral imaging gives us real measurement data,” he said. “This measurement data can be further analyzed in the software we provide to plan the field trials in advance, the same software we will use to analyze the data on a statistical basis. We can collect information at a higher rate, maybe every week or every day when necessary, and with higher precision and good repeatability of the measurement.”

A plant dynamically develops phenotypes from its interaction with the environment. Understanding the plant’s growing process in an ever-changing environment is essential for efficient crop management and agronomic decision making.

“In plant phenotyping, there is a growing season, so we collect data over the full growing season, from March to July,” commented Kutschera. “At regular intervals, or when agronomists tell us it is a critical point in plant growth, we use hyperspectral imaging and apply different algorithms, neural networks, artificial intelligence, whatever is needed to find the mathematical solution for the problem.”

With hyperspectral imaging, a plant disease or a biotic stress can be detected at an early stage to prevent pre- or post-harvest losses. “There are signals that you can read from the plant, and that’s a good indication of a plant being potentially affected by a virus, another kind of pathology or a lack of water,” Felsheim said.

Using UAVs and hyperspectral imaging is an upscaling, as it provides detailed spectral signatures. “We are working on a different scale,” Kutschera said. With an aircraft or a helicopter, each pixel on the image is several feet or several meters in dimension, whereas “with a UAV, we can go down to the centimeter level and distinguish single plants, like a corn plant or a potato plant as it is growing. We can work on the plant level.”

This different level of detail, in combination with the 3D geometry of the lidar, provides many new opportunities on how to analyze the data. “A single sensor is not enough to fulfill the needs of the market,” Kutschera insisted. “In the past, we already supplied thermal images and multispectral images to our customers, but the hyperspectral imaging delivers a lot more information. And combining hyperspectral imaging with lidar, thermal imaging, even with soil data and chemical analysis data of the plant, etc. will bring us one step further.”

Other fields

Agriculture is the primary focus, but not the only one. The center will also work on mining and infrastructure projects. Vegetation management is indeed a complex and costly part of utility and infrastructure operations. Bushes, invasive species, unhealthy or overgrown trees can imperil power lines and towers, but also damage or block roads, railways and bridges after an episode of rough weather.

As part of an application-specific mission for the Deutsche Bahn Rail network and with the permission of DB Fahrwegdienste GmbH, Headwall and Geo-Konzept could fly a drone over railways and take hyperspectral and lidar images. The resulting 3D images provided useful information on plant health, height measurements of the vegetation and the position of potentially at-risk trees adjacent to the railway. This eliminated the need to send arborists, who would normally walk or drive along the railways. The drone could fly at will and identify areas at risk, saving some time and money, partners said.

It is about “having the opportunity, with little effort, to remotely be able to scan a large area,” said Felsheim. Unmanned aircrafts can also cover areas that were formerly difficult or impossible to go to and fly at lower altitude for higher resolution and better quality images.

“Flying a drone is not allowed in every area, and you need the equipment,” he summarized. “Having it all in one place, bringing people together to create new applications and find new ways of utilizing this technology is really the idea behind the remote sensing center.”

A new UNSW study has shown that using a drone to film hippos in Africa is an effective, affordable tool for conservationists to monitor the threatened species’ population from a safe distance, particularly in remote and aquatic areas.

Drones with cameras might be a nuisance to privacy in the suburbs, but in Southern Africa they are helping a UNSW Sydney research team to save a threatened species: the humble hippo.

Wild numbers of the vulnerable Hippopotamus amphibius are declining because of habitat loss and hunting for meat and ivory, so monitoring their population is crucial for conservation management.

“Even though hippos are a charismatic megafauna, they are surprisingly understudied, because of how difficult it is to work with nocturnal, amphibious and aggressive animals,” said lead author Victoria Inman, a PhD candidate at UNSW Science.

Traditional methods of counting hippos include unreliable aerial surveys and hazardous land and water surveys.

Ground-based observations are unsafe for surveyors because the hippo is one of the most dangerous animals in Africa and lives in inaccessible areas.

Hippos also prefer an aquatic lifestyle and regularly submerge themselves in water, further complicating efforts to keep an eye on their population.

These challenges inspired UNSW researchers, in collaboration with conservation organisation Elephants Without Borders, to take to the skies with drones to film hippo pods and thus, more accurately estimate hippo numbers.

Their research, published in the international journal PLOS ONE on Friday, compared hippo counts from drone footage to land counts at the same lagoon with a resident hippo population in the Okavango Delta, northern Botswana, across seven days.

The researchers found the drone method just as effective as land surveys in estimating hippo numbers.

Ms Inman said researchers used a relatively low-cost drone, the multirotor DJI Phantom 4, to film hippos from various heights.

“The bird’s-eye perspective the drone gave us made it a lot easier to differentiate between individual hippos, even when they were crowded together,” she said.

“Our successful method can be repeated easily and avoids the dangers associated with counting hippos from land.

“It was also great that the drone did not bother the hippos.”

Ms Inman said the lower the drone flew, the more accurate the counting of the hippos because the video resolution was clearer.

“Counting hippos from 40 metres above was the best method and about 10 per cent more accurate than land surveys,” she said.

“Interestingly, we found that early morning was the worst time to survey because hippos were active and often submerging, making them difficult to count – this finding is counter to current advice.

“Another important advantage with the drone footage was our ability to measure hippos’ body lengths in order to determine their ages.”

Drones can help broader wildlife conservation efforts

Study co-author Professor Richard Kingsford, PhD supervisor and Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at UNSW Sydney, said their findings showed that drones are an increasingly valuable tool for observing wildlife populations.

“This method will be important for monitoring the age structure of hippo populations in different parts of Africa and to track breeding,” Prof Kingsford said.

“Importantly, our surveys also effectively tracked changes in the hippo pod over time, as adults emigrated from the lagoon as it dried – a typical response of hippos to changing water availability.

“Drones also provide a viable alternative to land-based counts and have low impact on hippos, offering further opportunities to survey inaccessible areas and, just as critically, collect this information safely.”

Ms Inman said there was an urgent need to monitor hippo populations in Africa because of the species’ long-term decline in many parts of the continent.

“Long-term statistics on animal populations are critical for understanding the nature and extent of species’ declines,” she said.

“Drone data could be routinely collected in different river systems, providing a guide to the numbers in hippo pods, seasonal changes and the ability to track the long-term status of hippo populations.

“Our study shows that small, commercially available drones are a simple, affordable and effective method for wildlife conservation organisations to monitor threatened species.”

Converting the places you fill up to oases to get fit, creating drone-friendly office buildings with convertible floors and eliminating millions of excess parking spaces by turning decks and lots into hotels or parks. 

All those scenarios are direct results of the march to a world where private vehicle ownership diminishes, replaced by one where mobility services and robocars rule the roads, according to the CEO of a global architectural design firm.

“Mobility is a huge opportunity to reshape the future of our cities, taking cities back for people, for the human experience instead of being choked by cars,” said Andy Cohen, CEO of San Francisco-based Gensler in a phone interview. “We see the future of cities as autonomous vehicles will improve our lives, and will also take our city streets back for people, improving the human experience. 

Gensler is already working on some of these projects with a wide range of clients. The most visible is the Gensler-designed Epic office building in Hollywood where video streaming giant Netflix is a tenant. 

The 15-story office tower features four above- grade levels that can convert to two office floors with potential for mezzanines. Alternate floors have been designed for eventual removability and both levels are wired for all stalls to be electric. The rooftop has a mail facility to distribute drone-delivered packages and, on the other side of the roof, there is a lounge-lobby that designed to be a terminal for passenger drone flights. 

A key feature, said Cohen, is the de-emphasis of parking in favor of facilitating ride-share pickups and drop-offs in autonomous vehicles.

“In the future all people are going to be picked up and dropped off at the front door of the building,” said Cohen. “So we designed this building into the future so people can be dropped off and picked up inside the parking structure. We created a VIP pickup and drop-off area, or coach area, that becomes the front door of the building. We think in the future all buildings will have to be designed this way.”

Indeed, Cohen keeps coming back to the design and use of current parking facilities as something that must change as the predicted boom in shared mobility services significantly reduces private vehicle ownership and the need for parking spaces. 

“Most cars are parked 95% of the time in our city streets. We see the ability for the autonomous car of the future where cars will be circulating and not parking.” said Cohen. “What we’re telling our clients is you have to design flexibility into the parking because we know there won’t be parking in the future. Therefore if we’re building parking, make sure it’s above grade, not below grade, because below grade is gonna be even harder to retrofit, but to create parking with flat floors, not with sloped floors...you can adapt them later for other uses, for office use, for residential use, for retail use, but not parking.”

Gensler has applied some of those principles by converting a parking deck at Northwestern University into a 12-thousand square foot innovation incubator now called The Garage.

At the Cincinnati, Ohio headquarters of data analytics and marketing firm 84.51˚, Gensler designed the conversion of three floors of an indoor parking area into future office space. 

One of the more novel projects Gensler is working on is with sporting goods company Reebok to imagine new uses for the 125-thousand gas stations in the U.S., converting them from filling stations to fitness stations and perhaps a place to swap a dead electric vehicle battery for a fresh one. 

“These 125-thousand gas stations are prime real estate in all of our major cities around the world,” said Cohen. We, at Gensler, took the initiative to work with Reebok and said, what if we retrofitted these gas stations into fitness centers, into health and wellness centers in the core of our urban cities? These can be great places where people can recharge, can do fitness, basically a health club, but a really positive way to take what is a gas station right now and turn it into a real great human experiences.”

He also sees converting gas stations into parks or other green spaces. 

Far above ground level, the prospect of mobility by drone hovers overhead, leading Gensler to join seven other architecture and engineering firms selected to create a concept for one of ride-share company Uber’s future Uber Air Skyports. Gensler’s concept is called CitySpace. The idea, Cohen says, is to create an airborne link between autonomous ground transportation and quick, unmanned flights to a final destination.

“We looked at either new skyports or retrofitting existing parking structures in cities where people can arrive in their autonomous vehicle or ride-share then get on an Uber Elevate that would take you from destination to destination by air,” explained Cohen.  

Uber is planning on a 2023 launch of Uber Air in cities that include Dallas, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia. 

Speaking of air travel, Cohen believes airport design will also be affected by the expected decline of self-driven vehicles, predicting parking lots and decks will be converted into pickup and drop-off areas with excess real estate reclaimed for other purposes. He sees the same conversion for the vast seas of blacktop at shopping malls. 

But what about how our living spaces are designed? Well...if you’re only sharing rides and not providing them, then perhaps all that space devoted to garages will be designed for other purposes, Cohen says. 

He admits, some ideas must be held in abeyance awaiting the right conditions before being put into action, but it’s not too soon to make some changes and plan for the future. 

“This is the game changing transformation,” Cohen pronounces. “We can take our city streets back, not for cars and buses, choking our city streets, but back for urban, incredible, vibrant living again.”

Having eyes on the ground, quickly, is essential to any effective disaster management plan. Having them in the air, however, looks set the be the next big thing in the offshore oil and gas industry. We consider the critical role drones can play in the minutes and hours after an oil spill.

An oil spill is a disaster – environmentally, commercially and in PR terms, not to mention the significant danger they can put offshore crew in. BP’s Deepwater Horizon in the Mexican Gulf in 2010, believed to be the worst ever recorded, spilt 210 million gallons of oil into the region over a period of several months. In more recent months, a spill of crude oil off the coast of Brazil has impacted thousands of miles of the country’s north-eastern coastline.

UAVs and what they might mean for the future of spill management

The best way to tackle such events is to respond quickly and effectively. However, doing so is a major challenge for oil companies and other responders. Can the latest technologies help?

Terra Drone believes it has proven they can. One of its subsidiaries, Terra Drone Angola, says it has successfully demonstrated how drones can be used as a surveillance and reconnaissance tool for oil spill incidents, speeding up the decision-making process in the event of a spill. During the oil spill response exercise conducted by a major oil and gas producer, an oil spill was simulated off the coast of West Africa to assess how drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used to quickly collect critical information to relay to responders.

“Environmentally friendly dye was released at the surface of the sea a few hundred meters from the nearest floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) platform using a surfer,” explains Terra Drone Angola’s operations director, Siva Keresnasami. The dye simulated an offshore spill with the aim of demonstrating how UAVs can support response measures.

“We wanted to promote the adoption of UAV technology as a tool to be used to enable effective management and monitoring of actual oil spill incidents,” Keresnasami continued.

An emergency response vessel was positioned a few hundred metres from the simulated spill, onboard was a trained team of UAV pilots operating an octocopter fitted with an RGB camera. Keresnasami says they anticipated one of the biggest challenges, the sun’s glare from the surface of the water, fitting the camera with a polarizing filter to reduce the effect.

What do UAVs have to offer in oil spill management?

The selection of UAV was critically important to the success of the project. The small and often crowded deck of a response vessel renders fixed wing drones unsuitable for this type of mission. Therefore, Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) UAVs are ideal for this type of scenario. Keresnasami adds UAVs equipped with Extended Visual Line of Sight (EVLOS) or Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) capabilities are best suited for this type of work.

EVLOS refers to an unmanned vehicle which can be operated at distance, extending beyond the line of sight of the pilot with so-called spotters relaying its flight information to the controller. BVLOS, an increasingly popular capability, enables flights to go even further. They are controlled by a pilot who is informed about their position, altitude, speed and direction by onboard instruments.

“The plan was to use software to track the flight path of the drone in real-time, while the UAV was used to fly the perimeter of the simulated spill area,” Keresnasami explains.

However, it’s not just the physical structure and onboard capability of a drone that is important: time in the air is critical too. Keresnasami says: “The longer the UAV can stay in the air, the better suited it will be for an oil spill response job. Oil spills can be spread over a large surface area and UAVs used in this application need to have the capacity to be in the air for more than an hour at least.”

During flight the UAV collects data, equipping responders with everything they need to make the right decisions. It can take photos, provide and record live video streams – helpful for post incident analysis – take thermal images, and provide the GPS coordinates necessary to target a response.

“Real-time transmission of videos and GPS coordinates can be incredibly helpful to identify the exact location of a spill so that other vessels with spill containment equipment – such as booms and dispersants – can be directed to the incident location,” Keresnasami says.

During the exercise, six flights were undertaken with the aim of locating and then sizing the spill. In the event of a real spill, this data would have been used to determine the most appropriate response. However, Keresnasami says there is much more UAVs can do: “Drones can also be used to assess the efficacy of spill containment efforts to see how well booms are containing the spill, or how well the dispersants are working to break down the oil sheen.”

The future of UAVs in the oil and gas industry

\The use of drones in the oil and gas industry is not new, they have been used to conduct inspections and surveys for some time. However, as technology advances, their application will continue to grow. Keresnasami says he expects to see increased automation, increased onboard processing capabilities, greater integration of artificial intelligence and new payloads (sensors). He also believes there will be less need for human intervention as they become “smarter machines”.

In the simulated scenario, and others like it, just two operators are needed to provide up to 10 hours of flight a day, making the proposition even more attractive as it reduces logistical requirements and therefore costs.

“There is a small window of time where oil slicks and spills can be effectively dispersed,” he concludes. “They can take to the sky quickly to identify the location of the spill, saving a great amount of time.”

The oil and gas exploration community is always looking to reduce risk, but in the event of a spill, having an eye in the sky quickly is one way of managing a response and reducing the impact on the surrounding environment. The success of this simulation might very well herald a new age in emergency response.

Unmanned aircraft are finding a range of applications, from agriculture to emergency services

US businesses are deploying drones in unprecedented numbers, as uses for the unmanned aircraft move beyond photography into mapping, gathering data and even tracking criminal suspects.

With thousands of developers now building apps for drones on a common platform, the Federal Aviation Administration has admitted that it wildly underestimated the number of commercial drones in service. It now expects that there will be more than 450,000 of them in the sky this year, a total it originally predicted for 2022.

Meanwhile, analysts at Barclays estimate that the global commercial drone market will grow tenfold from $4bn last year to $40bn in five years. They believe the use of drones will result in cost savings of some $100bn.

The rise of the commercial drone industry comes as the consumer market begins to look saturated. Having first risen to prominence in the 1980s as a military technology, drones were miniaturised in the 2000s, resulting in a vibrant market for hobbyists and photography enthusiasts.

Now, thanks to software and vast improvements in cameras, sensors and processing technology, the FAA says that commercial drones appear to be “at an inflection point of demonstrating powerful stages of growth” that will “continue to accelerate over the next few years”.

In the telecoms industry, where workers climb up treacherous poles for inspections, drones are being deployed to assess them from the air instead. At oil and gas companies the aircraft are being used to conduct their monthly pipeline surveys instead of hiring $2,500-an-hour helicopter crews.

Elsewhere, drones are generating climate data, monitoring borders, helping fire brigades to assess damage and aiding police Swat teams in suspect tracking.

For Shenzhen-based DJI, the leading consumer drone manufacturer, with an estimated 70 per cent global market share, the commercial market has been in its sights since 2017. Primarily a maker of consumer drones, its technologies were unexpectedly picked up by American soldiers in the late 2000s, before being banned over cyber security concerns, forcing the company to refocus its strategy.

But the rapid growth of the market, and its multitudes of new applications, have taken even the market leader by surprise. Commercial purchases grew DJI’s enterprise business by 80 per cent in the past year, yet the company has not always had standards and frameworks in place designed to meet the sensitive purposes needed by government agencies — such as the Department of the Interior, which mans the biggest fleet in the country — that are using its products.

“We are running into a problem: the product wasn’t designed to meet their needs,” Mario Rebello, DJI’s regional manager for North America, said at DJI Airworks in September. “We’re being judged by decision makers, professionals, policymakers and others who want the product to be meeting their requirements. [But] we are a consumer company.”

Other companies, meanwhile, have stumbled upon the commercial market almost by accident, as they adapt to new business applications that manufacturers had neither considered or foreseen.

“It’s very hard to forecast the use cases of a brand new, revolutionary product,” said Spencer Gore, chief executive of American drone maker Impossible Aerospace.

He says that when consumer drones first went mainstream around 2011, it was widely assumed that the likes of Amazon would be using drones to deliver products to people’s doorsteps by 2015. That potential was wildly overestimated — while other commercial applications appeared from nowhere.

For Adam Kaplan, the emergence of a market for public safety reshaped his entire business. In 2017 he had founded a gaming company called EdgyBees that used augmented reality so drone pilots could — in the real world — fly through a Star Wars-like universe seen through an iPad.

After inquiries from the emergency services, Mr Kaplan used the same technology to create aerial mapping tools now comparable to Waze, the Google-owned traffic app, giving public officials whole new fields of intelligence.

“Nobody thought that was a market — it was just that a bunch of police and fire departments went out to Best Buy and bought them,” Mr Kaplan said. “Counties like Los Angeles [realised] that instead of buying a $1m helicopter they could buy a $1,000 drone or a $25,000 drone. So it’s really evolving.”

Likewise, the three South African founders of DroneDeploy say their business plans had to adapt to a changing market. In 2011 their goal was to use aerial photography to catch poachers in Kruger Park, a national landmark the size of Israel.

“What we realised is that it’s an incredibly difficult problem, for all sorts of reasons,” said chief executive Mike Winn. “Identifying there’s a person there doesn’t solve the problem — you still have to drive through the bushes first.”

Instead, they shifted focus to building software to create two and three-dimensional maps of simple terrain, construction sites, turbines and power lines.

Among their clients is the building group Brasfield & Gorrie, which has been using drones since 2015 in its construction surveying efforts.

“It’s a pretty labour-intensive process where surveyors literally go out every hundred feet to shoot a point with survey instrumentation,” said Hunter Cole, an engineer at Brasfield. “That process could take days or weeks . . . Now it’s 20 minutes of flying and a little bit of process time afterwards. It’s gone from days or weeks to hours.”

Romeo Durscher, director of public safety integration at DJI, sees plenty of potential for growth. He notes there are 40,000 police departments in the US alone — and only 500 of them have helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft. “The other 39,500 have nothing,” he says. “There’s a tremendous market out there.”