Drone News & Articles

Running a fully autonomous drone operation without having to jump through regulatory hurdles is the dream of countless commercial drone operators. As many have stated, the technology to operate drones autonomously and beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) is readily available, but actually doing so is more about process than technology. However, the indoor space is virtually regulation free and is an ideal place to demonstrate these autonomous capabilities while also unlocking the value they represent. Startups like Ian Smith and Joseph Moster’s full-service indoor warehouse inventory solution called Ware have been created to do just that.

Ian has been a stalwart in the drone industry for years now as an employee at DroneDeploy as well as the host of the Commercial Drones FM podcast. With the founding of Ware, he’s looking to leverage those insights in a whole new way by bringing attention to the value that drones can create for warehouses by saving money, increasing efficiencies and improving performances.

Commercial UAV News has connected with Ian on a number of topics about the drone industry while also further exploring numerous insights from his podcasts. Ware’s recent funding announcement provided us with the perfect opportunity to reconnect with him to detail how his solution is providing value for the indoor drone sector, how he recognized this opportunity, what it means to get started with Ware and much more. 

Ian Smith: It is awesome. There is no FAA at all indoors. 

This is a really big point for me actually, everyone in drones has been constantly chasing automation, it’s that vision of having a drone that lives in a box on a construction site that wakes up every morning takes pictures, lands, uploads the data to the servers, the data is then processed, and insights are delivered. That's possible, and it has been possible technologically for the past five years or so. The problem has been regulation with rule making bodies, like the FAA, making this very hard to achieve, and that's why we don't see that a lot. We see a lot of companies showing the solution, but they are completely hamstrung by regulation.

So, a big reason this is attractive to us as well is that this is finally a time for us to prove to the rest of the world that drone technology can be automated and be useful like that. Regulations have not progressed as much as they should have for outdoors, so indoor applications are excellent showcases for people looking at the drone industry to show what's possible. 

What's funny is we get requests to do stuff outside the warehouse as well. Warehouses are not all inside. They have logistics operations and stuff outside as well. Imagine all those trucks outside picking stuff up and dropping things off, there's a pretty big problem there as well that I won't quite get into here. But we have to turn them down because although we can operate inside the warehouse autonomously, as soon as that drone goes outside those warehouse doors it is in the national airspace system and is regulated by the FAA. At that point you need to have a human monitoring the drone and be able to control it at any point. We just don't see the value in that yet for the customer or us. Right now, they are getting their own pilots to operate their drones outside, but we are not touching that yet until the current and future administrations start making automation and beyond line of sight drone regulation a priority. 

You obviously do see the value of staying indoors, so what can you say about how your experience in aviation, drones, and startups played a factor in the founding of Ware?

I started with flying helicopters. I then transitioned into the drone industry in 2013. I worked at a hardware company first, a startup called Delair, and we were building drones for outdoor applications. Then I went to DroneDeploy where I also started a podcast where I've talked to over 90 different guests about the way they use drones commercially... for flying outdoors. So, the common denominator here is that everything has always been outdoors, under the sky, all the way back to my aviation days flying helicopters. Ware is really interesting because it’s focused on this huge market for drones that fly indoors.

However, if you look at the drone market and how it has progressed, there hasn't been a time when the indoor opportunity has been unlocked. By creating Ware, we‘ve really seen over the past year that the technology is finally there to enable safe, scalable autonomous indoor operations. There’s an opportunity there that we’re looking to capitalize on and that has to do with solving this inventory tracking problem that warehouses and distribution centers have. 

Can you tell us more about this problem and why you were drawn to developing a solution for it?

Between my co-founder, Joseph Moster, our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and I, we have a combined total of 17 years’ experience in the commercial drone industry. When Joseph was investigating drone technology in the early days of the technology, he kept hearing about this inventory problem at warehouses. Recognizing the need was about a confluence of technology and opportunity, as we saw the problem and knew we could solve it with our own specific strategy.  

To be honest, it’s actually a weird problem. It’s counterintuitive, because you'd expect a warehouse to know where everything is because everything all comes in and it goes out at some point, but this is actually far from the truth. There is extreme inefficiency inside warehouses. They’re losing stuff constantly and this affects the entire upstream and downstream supply chain.

Because we have already brought this highly regulated, complex technology into so many outdoor industries like construction, agriculture, mining, oil and gas, linear infrastructure, utilities, you name it, it’s something that is very much in our wheelhouse. It’s our specialty, really.

As you said, everything comes into and goes out of a warehouse at some point, so why is there is such a major inventory tracking problem in warehouses today?

Today, warehouses have a bunch of humans. Humans are great, but we are prone to error and we don't like doing boring repetitive tasks, especially dangerous tasks. These humans walk around the warehouse and they do periodic cycle counts almost every day. They only count a small section of the inventory each day and then gradually, over a week or two weeks, they will finally cover all of the inventory.

However, during those two weeks there’s stuff moving around in the warehouse. There’s stuff being added and taken away, so there are huge gaps between those two weeks or weekly period. 

How does your warehouse inventory solution work and why do you think it’s an ideal solution to solve this problem? 

There are three phases to understand how Ware works.

The first component is the data collection phase. Drones are stationed on nests throughout the warehouse. They wake up at a certain time, take off, fly around and capture all the data in the specific part of the warehouse that they are in charge of, and then they all go to sleep on the nest. While asleep, they upload that data to our servers.

The second phase is data processing. One important distinction to make here is we don't actually see ourselves as a drone company per se, we are more of an analytics company, leveraging AI and Machine learning. We collect the largest dataset of warehouse inventory and then apply our algorithms on top of that to extract all kinds of insights. This second part is arguably the most important, because a drone is just a camera that we can put in any X, Y, Z coordinate in the warehouse. Once that data is collected from the drones, it’s boiled down into a spreadsheet of text, like a .CSV file, that shows where the inventory is, what it is, how much of it there is, and even where inventory is not.

Finally, once we extract that data from those images with our algorithms and distill it into a spreadsheet, we import it into the existing warehouse management system, which is referred to as a WMS. They can use our data to optimize how they move stuff around and within the warehouse. They can find where stuff is and find out where they have space for inventory. As a result of all this, for lots of different customers and potential customers, we are able to solve the problems they have.

How are warehouses able to measure the value of this process?

It all comes down to utilizing a process that is repeatable and scalable every day or night, or even over the weekend—whenever the warehouse has fewer people in it. Being able to deliver that data consistently is drastically different from how they do it today, but what’s really important is that there’s really nothing they have to change in how they operate today. They don't have to install anything major and they don't have to change how they do things. In fact, they’ll be doing one less thing, which is counting inventory themselves.

There are a number of other ideas that range from ground robots to just sticking a bunch of cameras up in a warehouse that are thought to solve this specific problem. The value Ware represents is really associated with the opportunity to solve the problem at a much lower price point and without upending established procedures. Drones these days are a commodity. 

What types of drone hardware are you utilizing for indoor warehouse inventory and how are you integrating it into your solution?

We are working with world class drone hardware manufacturers so that we don't have to build our own hardware in house. That is one of the key differentiators with us versus anyone else who has tried this before. There is no clear market leader here, so we stand a good chance of taking the baton and running with it because we don't develop any in-house hardware. Instead, we work with the world's best drones from a couple different manufacturers, and we deploy those in the warehouse with our navigation software on top.

These drones can already avoid obstacles by default. They already sense things that are in their way and can fly safely inside buildings without GPS around a bunch of metal that would normally mess with all the onboard sensors. That said, if you point at a map of the warehouse and tell the drone to go there, it wouldn’t have any idea how to do it because they don't know where 'there' is because we can't associate GPS coordinates with 'there'.

Our proprietary software allows our drones to define where ‘there’ is. We developed our own kind of indoor “GPS coordinate system” so the drone knows where to go and how to get there. 

Besides losing track of their inventory, what are some of the problems warehouse companies have? 

Obviously, a big problem they have is the cost of labor. This is a contentious point because people view it as drones taking jobs. However, with inventory, this is just one aspect of most people’s jobs, so they can actually be reassigned to do more valuable stuff like moving things around in the warehouse or getting other tasks done. This will help them focus more on the things that matter, rather than having to do mind numbing inventory exercises.

It’s also going to also help them reduce losses. We talked to one customer who lost just one box from one pallet that was full of wine, and it cost him $20,000. We are not claiming that we can completely eliminate losses—humans are still humans; they are not predictable—but when there is a theft or actual loss of something, we help stem that with a visual record of inventory on certain dates, and they can have that in their system to query. 

Another thing to consider is the way inventory is counted today is dangerous. When you think of warehouses and how they’re evolving, real estate is always getting smaller and smaller in terms of availability, so warehouses are growing up more than they are growing out. When humans do inventory today, they either walk along the floor with a barcode scanner in their hands and kind of look straight up and try to scan product that is 30–40 feet above their heads, which is really inefficient, inaccurate, and difficult. What some people do to get around this is that they harness themselves to elevated scissor lifts. The danger to this is that they could just fall off. This is a serious issue, falls from height are one of the leading causes of workplace fatalities Using a drone eliminates this altogether.

What types of warehouses stand to benefit the most out of your solution?

The big thing to understand right now is the current state of warehouse technology. Our first market is focused on the U.S. specifically. If you think of warehouse automation, robotics, and digitization as a spectrum, on the very lowest side, we have people who have been running these warehouses probably for decades, and everything is still written by hand with no location-based inventory system. This means when someone is told to grab something from the warehouse, they get a handwritten note in triplicate stating something like, "bring ten of these pallets of this product to the front." They don't even have a way to know where those pallets are, they just use their memory. If one of these people quit, or someone is on leave, then you’ve just lost a lot of proprietary information because there is no central database. That is furthest end of the spectrum—the lowest tech side of things.

On the other far side of the spectrum, you have fully automated dark warehouses. By ‘dark’ I mean, everything is done by a robot. If you stick a human in the loop in a dark warehouse it is going to mess everything up. Amazon is not even at the point where it has completely automated dark warehouses. They are quite automated, but they have a bunch of proprietary stuff going on where humans are still involved in a lot of cases. There are companies out there that are trying to build fully dark warehouses, these are really cool but insanely expensive. The cheapest models available are currently around $50 million. These dark warehouses are at the other end of the spectrum.

There is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle closer to the low-tech side of things. This sweet spot is where customers have a WMS and the inventory is scanned by hand with very little automation. Their WMS is a location-based inventory system, meaning that every pallet in every rack has a location assigned to it, and acts like a map to the warehouse. That is the sweet spot for us. There is a huge market there, and that is what we are going after.

Our technology addresses the bulk of the warehouse industry, at least in the U.S., and presents the most value for us and for the customer. The bigger the warehouse, the better the value. The bigger you go, the more complex your inventory is going to get so the more people you need to track it, and the more money and time you spend on doing inventory. That is why we are super interested in 3PLs (third party logistic providers) with warehouses of 100,000 sq. ft and up, these are really great candidates for us. We are also looking at some warehouses that have 500,000 sq. ft and above, which are gigantic—these are excellent candidates as well. Also freight forwarders and air freight is big too, as well as the beverage industry, they have tons of inventory flowing around at all times, so that would be ideal for our solution as well. 

If I’m a warehouse stakeholder that knows my inventory process could be streamlined, but I’m concerned that the effort to do so is going to be either too complicated or costly to fully investigate, what would you tell me?

We provide everything for the customer. We come in, we implement the localization system, which is pretty low tech and actually pretty cool because it isn't too complicated. Then we provide the drones based on how big the warehouse is and how often they want a full inventory count. If they want a count weekly we can use less drones, if they want it daily then we might have to put more drones in the warehouse to cover the entire area of the warehouse given whatever timeframe we may have to capture all that data, upload, process it, and load it into the WMS before the next day starts. Our solution allows them to have a full inventory audit every single day. We take care of everything: we integrate into their WMS and figure out which drones are best and how many are needed for specific operations based on the customer's needs. 

They don't have to change their workflow or adapt to a new piece of software from us. They are going to do what they do normally. We just automatically capture the data that humans were already capturing and inputting into their systems manually.

A really interesting way of thinking about our business is to compare it with Amazon Go. Amazon Go is a store where you go in and just grab something off the shelf and you walk out, and it knows exactly what you have. What we are essentially building here is Amazon Go for warehouses. So that warehouse people, when they are operating and running their warehouse, don't have to worry about all the bookkeeping, record tracking, and accounting of all of this stuff, they should be able to just go in and move stuff around, do what they want, and just be a lot more efficient. 

Essentially, it’s a full inventory solution. There’s a yearly fee and for that fee we provide the support, service, the boots on the ground, and implementation. Ware is there for you, if something goes wrong unexpectedly, we are going to be boots on the ground in the warehouse and will fix it for you.

Racegoers travelling to the Melbourne Cup will be under drone surveillance as authorities prepare for protests during today's iconic race.

Animal activists are expected to make themselves known outside the Flemington racecourse where thousands of people will watch the Melbourne Cup unfold.

Police will be keeping a close eye out for anti-racing protesters who have vowed to disrupt the event.

Two new drones will be used to monitor trains carrying more than 150,000 racegoers expected to take public transport to the event.

Metro Trains previously rented drones to monitor major events, but the new purchase means they'll be used more often to track crowd sizes, movements and any trespassers.

It also has a mobile CCTV station to help ensure the rail line to Flemington is kept clear for race goers. At its peak today, trains will run every four minutes to the track.

This is not the first time people concerned about the treatment of racehorses have picketed the $8 million Cup.

The Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses has planned a protest outside Flemington racecourse. It says the group has been inundated with public support since media reports of racehorses being sent to a slaughterhouse.

"People are certainly waking up to the truth behind this industry. People can't say they don't know anymore,"  Coalition spokeswoman Kristin Leigh said.

Metro Trains and Victoria Police have spent $100,000 to tighten security for the race and help people arrive there smoothly.

More than 1000 extra train services will run to and from the racecourse, one every four minutes during peak travel times.

Kaspersky has launched a new solution designed to help organisations and property owners defend themselves from unauthorised trespassing by civilian drones. Through a combination of several sensors – including a new approach to drone detection founded by the company using laser scanning – and machine learning technologies, Kaspersky Antidrone can automatically spot, identify and prohibit unmanned aircraft from entering restricted areas. This is all done without damaging the devices.

In 2018, the global drone market was estimated to be worth $14 billion and is expected to reach $43 billion by 2024. This growth is driven by the potential opportunities and positive changes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles can bring – from delivering goods and inspecting proposed mining sites or building constructions, through to fulfilling entertainment interests.

However, the mass adoption of this revolutionary technology could be affected by the negative connotations often associated with drones. In fact a recent study in UK found that only 31 per cent of respondents admitted having a positive attitude towards them. This perception is largely driven by cases of improper or illegal use of unmanned aircrafts. They can be leveraged for spying purposes, injure people through crashing, cause damage to critical infrastructure including nuclear power stations, or disrupt normal operations of an airport, as was the case when the runway of UK airport London Gatwick was closed because of flying drones.

Kaspersky Antidrone software coordinates the work of several hardware modules provided by partners and distinguishes drones from other objects. The primary detection module searches for drones using video cameras combined with radar, LIDAR, and audio sensors – depending on the customers’ needs and environment. Using a laser scanner to determine the position of the drone is unique to Kaspersky’s solution, and has not been applied to this field before.

When a moving object is detected in the sky, its coordinates are transmitted to a dedicated server, which then sends them on to a special unit. In accordance with data from the primary detection module, this unit rotates towards the object, tracks it and then the camera zooms in on it. At the same time, a neural network, trained to identify drones among other moving items, analyzes the object on the video. If it is distinguished as a drone, the server sends the command to the dedicated module to jam the communication between the device and its controller. As a result, the drone either flies back to the place it took off from or lands in the location where it lost signal with the controller. This means that the device will not be damaged, as there is no physical contact or attack towards the drone.

“Many members of Kaspersky Antidrone team, myself included, have long been drone pilots. Unmanned aircraft can sometimes pose a real danger. For instance, I’ve witnessed some risky situations during public events. It clearly causes some doubt around the use of the technology. Unfortunately, as a drone pilot, you often don’t know which locations are prohibited, so when your drone is unexpectedly crushed or physically attacked with hostile protection measures, it is very frustrating. That’s why, during the development of our product, we took the interests of drone enthusiasts as well as safety requirements and concerns into account. This helped us develop a way to ensure drones do not enter prohibited areas, without damaging them,” said Vladimir Turov, Project Owner of Kaspersky Antidrone.

The software can be delivered as a stand-alone solution within third-party hardware, as a mobile version (for example, to be used on the top of off-road cars), or integrated with other monitoring systems, including smart home infrastructure.

Housed in a large boxlike structure at the base of a transmission tower, a hexacopter drone powers up and begins its 2-hour, 20-mile, one-way inspection journey. Powered by a rechargeable battery, the hexacopter flies above the line structure and begins capturing still imagery, thermal imagery, and a video stream of the transmission tower and line. The drone streams this data in real-time over a secure connection to the utility’s asset management platform. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is programmed to inspect the line as it flies, but also to stop and capture visual and sensory data for transmission tower assets such as insulators and conductors. Equipped with a GPS guiding system, the drone flies along a pre-mapped route, and lands in a docking station at the end of the route. The powered docking station can either keep the drone for recharging, or use a robotic mechanism to change the drone’s battery and send it on to the next stretch of line for inspection.

The scenario above is just one example of what the future may look like for long-distance energy infrastructure inspection and asset management. Around much of the world, technology experts, regulators, UAV companies, and other interest groups are working through the benefits and challenges of allowing utilities and energy infrastructure asset owners to use beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) for drone inspection operations. Some say the benefits are clear, with significant cost savings to be passed onto utilities, and in turn ratepayers. Others argue that such autonomy exposes networks to both physical and cybersecurity threats.

In 2018, Xcel Energy became the first utility in the US to be granted permission to fly a BVLOS operation for transmission line inspection. The utility leaned on key benefits offered by this deployment and carefully addressed regulators’ financial, regulatory, and technical concerns. Additionally, Xcel Energy specified Colorado’s unique and diverse topography as a key factor behind the deployment. The mountainous western part of the state creates challenging inspection and service restoration scenarios, while the eastern plains have limited development and infrastructure, driving high maintenance deployment costs. Colorado represents an excellent canvas for a demonstration of the benefits of drones and UAVs for energy infrastructure inspection. As of this writing, NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy are the only two other utilities to be granted BVLOS permission in the USA, according to the FAA.

Below are several of the key market and UAV characteristics that are impacting the global market and future deployment of UAVs and BVLOS operation for energy asset inspection. An in-depth analysis of market drivers and barriers for drones and robotics can be found in Navigant Research’s report, Drones and Robotics for Transmission and Distribution Operations.

Market Drivers for BVLOS UAV Operation for Energy and Infrastructure Inspection

Much of the world’s energy infrastructure is aging or outdated, and utilities are constantly seeking ways to improve operational safety and cutting costs. The market drivers that will facilitate the deployment of BVLOS UAVs for energy infrastructure inspection include the following:

• Aging electric infrastructure and network reliability risks: The majority of the electric grid throughout the developed world is more than 40 years old and in need of repairs and upgrades. In developing regions, similar conditions exist, whether as a result of aging over time or poor original construction and subpar maintenance. Compounding this problem is the fact that transmission lines are typically poorly instrumented, providing utilities with limited visibility into asset condition and risk of failure. With a long-distance, cost-efficient BVLOS UAV inspection platform, a utility can routinely inspect assets and ensure they are repaired or replaced prior to failure.
• Safety improvements: Historically, the job of asset inspection is either conducted by a lineworker hoisted up a transmission pole or from a helicopter. Both bring significant safety risks—increasing costs and liabilities to utilities while putting company employees at risk. UAVs can quickly and affordably access remote transmission networks for routine and risk-driven inspections. The addition of BVLOS capabilities reduces the required truck rolls, again increasing safety while cutting costs versus the current standard operating procedure.
• Financial savings and cost shifting: Perhaps the most significant benefit UAVs and BVLOS operations brings to utilities is the cost savings potential. Navigant Research estimates that 70% of utilities outsource their transmission line inspection and pay for helicopter inspection or truck rental services. UAVs, and especially autonomous BVLOS operations, would significantly reduce and potentially eliminate the need for helicopters or truck rolls for transmission line and tower inspections. A remotely piloted UAV only requires the drone hardware and the contracting or employment of a pilot, while a BVLOS autonomous flight requires the integration, digital GPS system mapping, and autonomous drone equipment. The latter can be expensive to implement and deploy, but the per-inspection costs will shrink significantly over time. For example, one utility estimated the cost of a helicopter transmission tower at $5,000 per tower. The same inspection can be done with a drone, which provides higher data quality and granularity for an estimated $200-$400.

Market Inhibitors of BVLOS UAV Operation for Energy and Infrastructure Inspection

Although a strong set of favorable market conditions and product benefits are pushing for the eventual deployment of BVLOS UAV’s for energy and infrastructure inspection, regulatory, financial, and technological obstacles remain and must be overcome before these systems become mainstream. Major market inhibitors include the following:

• Regulatory Stringency: Federal regulations in most regions around the world govern the use of UAVs, especially for commercial industries. Citing security, safety, and reliability concerns, many countries require that UAV devices be flown in line-of-sight of the pilot, limiting the capabilities and savings of the device. These concerns are magnified for autonomous BVLOS operation, as significant cybersecurity concerns come into play as well. Until these restrictions are modified or eliminated (which Navigant Research expects to take several years), the deployment of UAVs for energy infrastructure inspection will remain limited.
• Financial Requirements: Pilot programs and case studied have confirmed long- and short-term financial benefits to utilities, but the required capital for an investment in UAVs for infrastructure inspection is significant. For a fully integrated fleet of UAVs and a custom data integration and analytics suite for a major investor-owned utility with significant transmission infrastructure, costs can be incurred upward of $10 million. Utilities must demonstrate to their regulators and ratepayers that the financial benefits of a UAV fleet for asset inspection is brings positive cost-benefit analysis results.
• Technology Limitations: Although competitive offerings exist, the technologies required for an autonomous deployment of BVLOS UAVs are not fully developed. As the autonomous functionality of a UAV and its platform increases, the cost and complexity of integration and operating is magnified. Full functionality of UAV software platforms and data analysis tools often require extensive integration with existing utility software systems, which can be a challenging and expensive proposition. Strict utility cybersecurity protocols must be met, which not all autonomous drone solutions can offer. And it’s important to consider that most utilities do not have GPS-based digital maps of their transmission infrastructure, further increasing the complexity of a BVLOS UAV deployment

Navigant Research expects that today’s favorable market conditions and the sum of the benefits offered will propel UAVs and BVLOS operations into mainstream utility deployment within the next 5 years. Xcel Energy was the first, but it won’t be the last.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are shaking up mine sites across the country and abroad. More commonly known as drones, these devices have successfully carved a niche over the last few years in the mining world for their advanced mapping and inspection applications.

This includes tasks such as stockpile reports, drill and blast planning, compliance, regulatory reporting and inspection of roofs, silos and large fixed and mobile plant equipment.

These abilities undoubtedly result in cost benefits for miners who take advantage of the accuracy afforded by the drones’ measurements.

However, the ease of access drones have to unstable or potentially hazardous areas also brings with it a profusion of possible safety benefits.

“The primary safety benefit by using drones is to simply keep people away from hazards and dangerous working environments,” explains Andrew Chapman, NSW operations director at drone specialist Australian UAV (AUAV).

AUAV was founded in 2013 with the aim of becoming “the leading drone data service company in the country,” according to Chapman.

Now boasting offices across Australia, the company’s mining clientele includes the likes of Downer, Glencore and Rio Tinto. Chapman says using drones at mine sites delivers several safety benefits.

“It is no longer necessary to have people anywhere near danger if you only need to view, inspect or measure things,” Chapman continues.

“Obviously by removing the surveyor from walking through an active mine area we are not only reducing but entirely avoiding the possibility of them being harmed by mobile plant and machinery, drilling and explosives, dangerous chemicals, flyrock and other hazards.”

And since drones tend to be fairly compact and manoeuvrable, they are used not only in the free air of the open pit, but in tight underground environments as well.

Startup company Emesent, a drone-focused spin out of Data 61, the technology arm of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), specialises in drones for underground environments.

The company raised $3.5 million in November 2018 to commercialise its first product Hovermap, a LiDAR-equipped drone autonomy and mapping payload used for collecting data in dangerous underground environments, such as 3D scans of mine stopes.

Emesent chief executive officer and co-founder Stefan Hrabar says the technology dates back over 10 years to his time at CSIRO researching drone robotics and 3D LiDAR-based localisation and mapping.

“There are definitely elevated areas where you want to have a bird’s eye view,” he says.

“Then for underground there are areas where the unsupported ground might be unstable and you just don’t want to send people into those areas, so having a drone that can go in and capture data — whether it’s capturing images or generating LiDAR maps like we do — keeps people out of those areas.”

Hovermap provides a direct safety benefit by keeping miners out of dangerous locations, but it also provides indirect benefits.

Data collected by the system provide mining operations with an improved understanding of geological structures in the rock, including breaks or other weaknesses in the strata that could be identified as no-go areas.

This concept extends to areas where people have become trapped; as Hrabar explains, “sending in a drone for search and rescue is definitely a good usecase”.

Interestingly, drones that fly underground are not subject to the same aviation regulations as drones in the open air.

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), the body that monitors flight safety in Australia, has yet to confirm to Emesent whether or not underground environments fall under its jurisdiction.

“There aren’t any specific CASA requirements for underground,” Hrabar says.

“There are obviously very strict regulations already in place for underground mining.  Mines have their own HSE policies that make sure people are kept away from dangerous machinery and that all of those policies apply when using a drone underground.”

The first company to receive beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) certification from an aviation body for a fully autonomous UAV was Israeli company Airobotics, which achieved this milestone from the Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) in 2017.

Airobotics’ UAV Optimus 1 distinguishes itself from rival drones by allowing for autonomous take-off and landing via a remote storage unit called Airbase, thereby eliminating remote pilots from the process entirely.

The company has received over $140 million in investor funding since June 2016. It opened its first Australian office in Perth in late 2017 and expanded to the United States in September 2018.

Airobotics believes that by eliminating pilots entirely from the equation, safety is improved as it removes human factors.

“Our system has a higher safety level than a manually operated drone concept,” explains Airobotics VP marketing Efrat Fenigson.

“A person flying a drone is not considered to be the safest thing in the world. And the reason I can say that with confidence is that we were certified by the CAAI based on that safety level.

“We were accredited by them to fly without a human pilot and they mentioned that we are safer than the normal concept of flying with a person; the safety level for the system itself is very high.”

AUAV also has similar ‘out-of-the-box’ drone technology in place, Chapman says, but due to current Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) regulations a human is still required to oversee the drone’s activity.

“CASA is certainly trying, but they are a government agency with limited resources at their disposal,” he says. “The regulations are conservative and slow-moving in order to protect the manned aviation world — pilots, passengers and the people below — and so are years behind what could be safely done with the current technology.”

Like Airobotics, Chapman also thinks the lion’s share of drone work will be fully automated in future, which is why AUAV is focused more on getting the best possible data rather than fancy flying skills.

“All our mapping work and a large proportion of our inspection work is already fully automated in terms of the drone’s flight,” he says.

“Drones can fly themselves on mapping runs in a much more accurate manner than a human pilot ever could, and having them fly themselves also allows our crews to work on higher-level problems.”

These three companies are each contributing to the burgeoning UAV space in their own unique ways and helping to shape the potential future of the industry’s still nascent potential for safer mining.

Mining drones have come a long way in the past few years and the technology is becoming increasingly accessible and affordable for miners. As regulation evolves to meet the pace of the technology there is no doubt the mining industry will continue to see more of them in future.

Ephraim Kofi Kenney does not like to work in the fields scaring pests away. But today he must.

A flock of migratory birds has repeatedly invaded his parents’ rice plot outside Accra, Ghana’s capital, and the 16-year-old has been tasked with keeping the invaders away from the young crop.

If he fails, there will be no harvest on the one-acre (half-hectare) farm this season.

“This work makes me very tired. I can lose my voice because of shouting at the birds,” said the youth, as he tugged at a rope attached to a bell he was using to scare off the hungry creatures.

“I wish there was a way to make it easier.”

Nearby, farmers and researchers are experimenting with one possible answer: A drone that can help farmers protect their crops from the effects of climate change and ward off hungry birds at the same time.

In a project run by the Netherlands-based Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) rice farmers are being taught how to use drones to carry out jobs such as spraying fertilizer more efficiently and mapping scarce water sources, said George Madjitey, CEO of GEM Industrial Solutions.

But there turns out to be a bonus: The drones can emit a noise to keep the birds from undoing all the farmers’ hard work, said Madjitey, whose social enterprise is one of the local firms supplying drones for the project.

The drones cannot operate at all times - but they can help cut down on the need for work like Kenney’s, which can keep young people away from their studies.

As climate change brings more unpredictable and extreme weather, small-scale farmers are increasingly turning to technology to help them find ways to keep their farms sustainable, agricultural experts say.

While drones have become a staple in farming tool kits in many parts of the world, Ghana’s rice farmers are for the first time learning how the devices can help them adapt to the prolonged droughts the country is experiencing.

With dry spells killing crops and drying natural sources of food across Africa, migratory birds now spend more time feeding on grain fields they come across because they don’t know how long it will be before their next meal, said Kunga Ngece, a Nairobi-based development expert.

According to Madjitey, a single drone can scare away birds on a farm as large as three acres (1.2 hectares).

“The drone makes work easier for farmers because it can operate over a wide range of land. Also, the children are able to stay at home with their families and do their homework instead of being on the farm,” he said.

Complex Problems

According to Ghana’s minister of food and agriculture, Owusu Afriyie Akoto, about 80% of the country’s farmers have been impacted by drought this year.

Crop yields have dropped by about 7% since a decade ago, and the country loses more than $200 million every year to droughts and flooding, he said in a press conference during the 2019 African Green Revolution Forum held in Accra.

Since the CTA launched its Eyes in the Sky, Smart Techs on the Ground project in Ghana three years ago, starting with cassava and cashew nut farmers, more than 2,800 farmers in rural Ghana have become involved, Madjitey said.

Rice farmers have been included since September, he said.

When farmers join the project, they organise into cooperatives of about 100 people. Each cooperative then pays for, uses and maintains a set of drones, which can cost upwards of $1,000 each, he said.

The farmers are grouped by neighbourhood, so a single drone can cover two or three farms each time it goes on a flight, said.

Usually, one or two farmers in each cooperative are trained to use the drones and they operate the devices for all the farmers in the group, he added.

“This ensures the technology reaches as many of them as possible,” Madjitey said, as he walked around an irrigation project in Kpong, one village involved in the drone effort.

The use of drones in agriculture is part of a global move toward technical innovations that allow farmers to work faster and more efficiently.

According to a report on the digitalization of agriculture in Africa published by the CTA in June, technology can be a “game changer” in supporting and accelerating the industry across the continent.

“With so much at stake, it is no surprise that most African countries have prioritized agricultural transformation as a key pillar of their national strategies,” added the report.

Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which works with small-scale farmers, said the continent’s farmers have long lagged behind the rest of the world when it comes to technological innovation.

“Africa has been going round and round in circles, but digital innovations now present an opportunity to change things. Drones are helping farmers solve complex problems in a simple way,” Kalibata told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

For example, she noted, drones can be used to collect field data - such as crop inventories or the status of irrigation infrastructure - over a wide area.

This data can help farmers and policymakers plan for and adapt to the ongoing effects of climate change, she said.

Young Innovators 

Helping farmers adapt to climate change also presents new business and job opportunities, said Giacomo Rambaldi, head of the drone project at CTA.

Since its launch, Eyes in the Sky has been working with business startups run by young people in more than 20 Africa countries, he explained.

The project trains youth in rural areas to operate agribusinesses, such as creating and selling innovations that can improve production for smallholder farmers.

“Some of them are doing really well. They are employing other people and they have quite successful operations,” said Rambaldi.

One reason drone technology has not seen more uptake among African farmers is that many African countries either have no laws regulating the operation of drones or ban their use by civilians, he noted.

In countries like Ghana where drone technology is allowed, however, some farmers are seeing the benefits.

As well as helping them save time and labor, farmers point out that drones cut down on the health risks associated with being in daily contact with chemicals on crops and microbes in muddy fields.

“Drones have taken away all these discomforts,” said Susan Fiebor, a farmer in the village of Asutsuare.

The same drones used to film Hollywood movies have been repurposed for Harvard researchers to study the Amazon.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), formerly used for filming blockbusters like Skyfall and The Wolf of Wall Street, have been specially adapted to withstand the heat and humidity of the largest tropical rainforest in the world.

Until recently scientists relied on towers, aircraft, and satellites to help them understand the habitat, but the data they collected was limited and biased to certain ecosystems.

The use of powerful, six-bladed “hexacopters” has enabled researchers to monitor crevices that were previously unreachable and assess how the forest is responding to climate change, deforestation, and fire.

Scot Martin, Harvard University Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, is a part of the team using the UAVs to collect the new data.

“Normally when people think of drones, they think taking pictures,” Martin said. “These types of UAVs, called hexacopters for their six blades, are also used in Hollywood to film movies and television shows.

“Instead of filming or taking pictures, scientists attach a one-kilogram chemical-sensing package to the front. [The package] is like an electronic nose sensing the forest.”

Throughout the Amazon, a handful of towers sit atop hills, measuring data from the nearby environment and relaying it back to scientists.

Now Harvard researchers, in collaboration with experts at Amazonas State University (UEA) in Brazil, have a way to measure the areas that the towers cannot reach.

“If you want to understand the forest, that is where the UAV fits in. It’s the middle ground,” Martin said. “It gives us a new ability to respond to science questions.

“This study is showing what can be possible.”

The UAVs are released from the top of the old observation towers and can fly for around 17 minutes before they need to be charged.

Every plant on earth emits unique vapours, known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can fluctuate when they are exposed to stressors such as floods and droughts.

Sensors attached to the drones can monitor these VOCs, to determine how the plants’ health is adapting to such stressors as climate change and extreme weather.

“It sounds like crazy science fiction, but it’s not,” said Martin.

Harvard currently has a grant from the National Science Foundation for a three-year research project in the rainforest, but Martin envisions his research continuing in the biodiverse Amazon for many years to come.

“Ten years from now, I will probably still be doing research there,” he said.

“I expect that drones will be used in scientists’ tool chests more and more around the world in the future.”

You could soon be watching a movie that was partially directed by an autonomous drone. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a system that could allow a drone to learn how to capture scenes for a film from above. What’s more, these smart drones would shoot with artistic flair.

These researchers had drones film scenes from different perspectives and then had real people rate which shots they thought looked best. Based on this feedback, the drone was able to learn what kind of shots people thought were the most artistic and generally appealing.

Their work is outlined in a research paper titled “Can a Robot Become a Movie Director? Learning Artistic Principles for Aerial Cinematography,” which appears on arXiv, the repository of academic journal articles that haven’t yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Rogério Bonatti, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in CMU’s School of Computer Science, tells Inverse that his team learned a lot from the feedback they received from humans when it came to informing A.I. drones which angles made for the most epic shots.

“We had people rate the quality of several shots in different environmental contexts, and the system automatically learned which types of shots make the resulting movie more visually appealing. The system even learned that keeping the same shot type for too long makes the movie boring and that it should switch often, but not too often, otherwise the images become too confusing.” — Rogério Bonatti

The system also learned to avoid objects that could get in the way of a good shot. The drone was equipped with LiDAR, which uses pulsing lasers to determine proximity to nearby objects, so it could map its surroundings.

Bonatti did a lot of research before beginning this project. He says he “read several books on photography and cinematography” and interviewed several professionals from the entertainment industry. He wanted to learn what difficulties filmmakers face when they’re making a movie.

One problem filmmakers often have to deal with is getting good shots with drones, because it can take a whole team of people operating the drones to get the shot right. With an autonomous drone that can learn how to get the best shot without any help, things could become much simpler.

“The largest impact of our technology will be in democratizing professional cinematography to any person, anywhere,” Bonatti says. “High-end Hollywood productions will probably continue to be done using large groups of highly skilled professionals, because they involve scripted scenes and no margin for errors.

“Our system, in contrast, allows a common user to have the creative power of a filming crew while filming activities such as radical sports or social events.”

This research focused on how to get good shots for a film with one autonomous drone, but Bonatti says the next step could be looking at how to get multiple drones filming a scene at once.

“We’re looking into using multiple drones as future work, which is a very exciting direction,” Bonatti says. “Besides extra caution on safety to avoid collisions between drones, an interesting challenge that arises in this case would be minimize how much one drone sees the other one in the final footage.”

Bonatti’s research has been accepted by the Journal of Field Robotics, and will be presented at the 2019 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in November in Macau, China.

An early retail listing on Newegg’s Canadian store has given us official images of DJI’s unannounced Mavic Mini, as well as listing its specs. DJI’s new drone is something of an open secret at this point. We saw an FCC listing for the drone back in August, and DroneDJ published hands on images just last week. But the retailer listing adds credence to those earlier leaks, and prices the diminutive drone at $646.15 Canadian dollars (around $494) when sold with DJI’s Fly More kit.

One of the more important specs listed on Newegg’s page is the drone’s weight of just 249g. This means that any owners in the US (and soon the UK) won’t have to register this drone with the authorities in order to fly it. Previously, DJI’s lightest Mavic drone was the Mavic Air, which weighs 430g, far above the FAA registration cutoff of 8.8 ounces (250g). Both the retailer listing as well as images leaked earlier this month from DroneDJ show how it’s small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. DroneDJ notes that it has a similar width and height to a smartphone.

Flight time is rated at 30 minutes according to the product listing (which corroborates with DroneDJ’s previous report), and recording resolution apparently tops out at 2.7K rather than 4K, which DroneDJ speculates is an attempt to stop the Mavic Mini from cannibalizing sales of DJI’s Mavic Air or Mavic Pro drones. You can find more pictures of the new drone over on WinFuture.

The retailer listing doesn’t give any information about when the Mavic Mini might see a release, but with a DJI announcement set to take place at 9am ET on Wednesday, it sounds like we might not have long to wait.

On July 2, 2019, thousands of people in Chile and Argentina had the incredible opportunity to witness the moment when the moon completely blocks the sun's disk in a total solar eclipse. 

It is extremely difficult to translate into images or words the magical experience and deep feelings experienced while witnessing such an event. So, my girlfriend, Apolónia, and I had the crazy idea of flying a drone with a camera to record a video of totality. Maybe, we thought, this could help to make this moment last in our memories. I was busy controlling three of my cameras while she was flying the drone during the maximum of the eclipse. 

The final video is the result of drone footage captured during totality and mixed with some still shots taken using different exposures over the course of 2 minutes and combined to reveal a dramatic range of lighting that is not otherwise visible to our naked eyes and standard cameras. The sequence was captured in Lambert, a town 19 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of La Serena, Chile. I used a Nikon D850 camera with a 600-millimeter (24 inches) telephoto lens for still photos, with a Star Adventurer portable mount and a Mavic Pro I drone for the aerial videos.