Drone News & Articles

Digital models of the islands of Canna and Sanday in the Small Isles are to be created to provide a new perspective of the isles' archaeology.

A fixed wing drone was used to photograph the islands last week.

The new data will provide information on the shape and extent of the turf and stone structures such as settlement mounds, shielings and hut circles.

Evidence of traditional rig and furrow cultivation strips will also be mapped in detail.

The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) commissioned the company Geo.Geo to undertake topographic modelling of the islands.

Derek Alexander, head of archaeology a NTS, said: "We are really excited about this project. We are keen to see the first results of the drone photography and modelling.

"While we already have quite a good map showing the location of the numerous archaeological sites on Canna and Sanday, this new work will provide us with detailed imagery of each of the sites - many of which are defined as low mounds."

The work was funded by grants from NTS members' centres in London, Angus and Argyll.

Tags: Archaeology, 3D Mapping, Drone Surveying

A drone delivery service could grow retail sales in the ACT by $30-40 million by 2030, with more than a third of that going to small business, according to an economic impact study commissioned by Project Wing.

The study by AlphaBeta says small business could reap an extra $10-15 million with drones able to reach more customers, more cheaply than by road.

AlphaBeta says businesses could reach up to four times the number of customers with drones bringing more households into range.

It says the current radius of food delivery in Canberra is only about four or five kilometres, but drones flying at 120km/h can deliver a package 10 kilometres away in less time than it takes a car to drive five kilometres.

“Doubling the range to 10 kilometres triples the number of households within range of a restaurant based in central Canberra, from 25,000 households to 75,000 households,” the study says.

Delivery costs could be cut by up to $12 million per year by 2030, assuming consumers receive a fee decrease that is proportional to the reduction in underlying costs, with costs for some items such as takeaway food falling in the long term by up to 80-90 per cent.

AlphaBeta says current delivery costs are prohibitive for some business, with restaurants paying around 30 per cent of each order value to online delivery service providers.

“These costs make it unprofitable for some businesses to offer last-mile delivery at all, despite a growing customer preference for online shopping and delivery,” it says.

With drones saving customers time and money, AlphaBeta says consumers will make additional or higher-value purchases.

“While the value is hard to estimate precisely, drone delivery could generate an additional 600,000 annual retail transactions in the ACT in 2030, worth around $30-40 million in revenue. This benefit could be as high as $12,000-$16,000 per relevant retail business,” it says.

AlphaBeta says drone delivery will suit new market entrants who do not have the scale of bigger companies to offer low-cost delivery, encouraging more competition in the ACT market.

“Drones could be a convenient, affordable option for new local businesses to participate in last-mile delivery and engage in e-commerce. This would facilitate a more productive, competitive business environment in the ACT,” it says.

Kickstart Expresso’s Paul and Liat Davis with the Wing delivery packages.

In a drone delivery trial with Wing, Fyshwick-based Kickstart Expresso has been delivering a limited menu of coffee and breakfast items to 150 potential customers in the Bonython region, making up to 40 deliveries in a three-hour session, averaging six to eight minutes from order to delivery.

Using drones, Kickstart could deliver hot coffee from a single location to 6000 households, compared with the 250 to 400 drive-through customers it serves each day, the AlphaBeta study says.

Project Wing CEO James Ryan Burgess, who visited Canberra last week and spoke to Gungahlin businesses and residents about the company’s move there next year, said AlphaBeta had made certain assumptions about adoption rates and what the penetration would be in the ACT but he believed they were ‘pretty conservative’.

He said the Bonython trial had shown testers were using the service even more than what Wing had predicted they would and appreciating its convenience and speed.

Next year, Wing will be based in a Mitchell warehouse where it will house its fleet of about 30 drones and, after consulting with the community, trial delivery services in the suburbs of Franklin, Harrison, Crace, Palmerston and Gungahlin.

The Bonython experience, which also sparked a storm of protests about noise and privacy that went all the way to Federal Parliament and prompted a Legislative Assembly inquiry, has seen Wing invest in quieter drones and move to reassure the community about privacy.

“If these aircraft are a nuisance to society then society is going to push back,” Mr Burgess said. “As the technology improves it has to show that it’s delivering value without negative impacts for it to be desired and adopted.”

For now, Wing is focused on delivering small, urgent, on-demand packages in the areas of pharmaceuticals, chemist items and food, although Mr Burgess admits that in time there could be bigger drones to carry bigger payloads.

“When you study what people need quickly, you don’t need very much of something, so we’re not planning to replace a trip to the grocery store to restock the refrigerator, but just those items that you need in a moment’s notice,” he said.

And the smaller the packages, the smaller and quieter the aircraft.

Wing’s biggest drone has about a metre wingspan, weighs 4.5kg, and is made mostly of lightweight foam material. They have 12 rotors instead of the standard four on other drones, to withstand multiple failures, but Wing is still to overcome the hurdle of being able to fly in bad weather, with rain affecting the electric motors.

Mr Burgess said deliveries to high-rise apartments was something for the future and Wing was focused on the suburbs where distance from services is more of a factor.

He said the Canberra trials were the most advanced in the world. “There is no other place in the world where we can do this and get that feedback from the community, saying what they like, what they don’t, what we can improve,” he said.

The next step was lodging a development application for its Mitchell warehouse and continuing to talk to the community.

The Christmas Spectacular show with the Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall in New York is one of those must-see shows during the Holiday season. The show has become an annual tradition for a lot of people and over the many decades of the show’s existence little has changed. For instance, the oldest and perhaps most famous aspect of the show, ‘The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers‘ has been a staple since 1933. For this year, however, the organization behind the Christmas Spectacular show has decided to change things up a little by adding Intel Shooting Star Mini drones to the mix and creating an entire new finale, called ‘Christmas Lights’. 

One hundred Intel Shooting Star Mini drones have been added to a brand-new finale scene. A short video of which you can see below. Intel tells us that the drone performance will be Intel’s longest running indoor drone light show with more than 200 performances between November 9th and January 1, 2019, as part of the Christmas Spectacular.

“Intel Shooting Star mini-drones, representing Christmas lights, will create various images and animations that are synchronized to music and lighting effects performing alongside the ensemble and Rockettes. As they build in numbers throughout the scene, the final culmination will showcase a one hundred drone light show, as their movement and flight path will interact with advanced digital projections to make various scenic elements magically come to life.”

The new finale, ‘Christmas Lights’ was overseen by Sam Buntrock, the creative director of new digital content. From a distance, the drones merely look like floating lights. but they do add a special 3D effect to the show.

The video can be seen at https://twitter.com/DroneDJ/status/1064926110729814016

Specifications and Features:

Weighing in at less than 68 grams, the Intel® Shooting StarTM mini-drone is constructed with a soft frame made of flexible plastic. A 180-degree cage covers the four propellers. The Intel® mini-drone fits in the palm of a typical hand – all features designed to promote safety when flying near people.

Type: Quadcopter with propeller guards

Size: 177 x 156 x 34 mm

Take Off Weight: <68 grams

Max Flight Time: 8 Minutes

Average audience Show Time: >4 Minutes

LED: Over 4 billion color combinations based on RGBW

Tags: Drone light show, Events

The construction industry is changing rapidly and to cater to the booming demand and increased expectations, the role of technology would increase at every level of construction. It is expected that in the next 10 years, the use of drones in construction will register a manifold growth and for futuristic buildings, drones will play a leading role.

Drones would lower the costs of projects, increase productivity and enhance data sets through improvements in photographic visualization. Improvement in surveying accuracy would be another benefit of using drones in construction which would help in saving both time and money. Increased use of drones in the construction industry will create new jobs and add value to the economy.

Transforming construction

As per a PwC report, around 600,000 people will be employed in the drone industry by 2030. The report also says that other than providing inexpensive and efficient surveying construction sites, inspecting disrepair of buildings, drones would also help to collate 3-D information and seamless integration with the BIM systems that would revolutionize the construction sector.

Another report by Goldman Sachs says that the biggest use of commercial drones would be in the construction sector, mainly in surveying and mapping sites. It estimates that total global spending on drones in the commercial market will be $100 billion.

Incorporating drone flight throughout all phases of the construction life cycle would provide a comprehensive record of all activities, enabling the managers and supervisors to keep track of everything until the completion of the project. This would leave no room for speculation and doubt. And unnecessary delays in projects could be avoided as the exact duration by which the project would be completed would be known.

Benefits over other methods

In the age of automation, construction industry cannot keep itself insulated from the changes and this explains the increase in BIM adoption in recent years.

Rob Walker, PwC’s UK engineering and construction leader, said: “Embedding drone flights in the construction lifecycle can provide a compelling ‘golden record’ of activity and we are already seeing tangible benefits from users”. Survey times can be 400 times faster than conventional methods, costs reduced by as much as 40% and data can be shared via the cloud with multiple stakeholders anywhere in the world, stressed Walker.

This enables faster decision making, and people can be freed up to focus on higher-value work – and this is just the start of our drone journey and tighter integration with other sources of management data.”

The highly reliable and precise information collected by drones would offer real-time monitoring and supervision would be easy as there would be no need to physically visit the site of the project. Collaboration between different teams and parties working on a project will be enhanced as everyone would be adequately informed and there won’t be any miscommunication.

Interestingly, the increased use of drones will also boost BIM adoption. Drone would also make it easier to create 3D models which then can be imported with BIM. It would not only increase productivity and efficiency but also provide a better understanding of the project.

Drones can capture dozens of high-resolution imagery of the project area. The images can then be combined. Another crucial benefit of drones would be that the data could be embedded into BIM package in different file formats. This would make the workflow simpler.

A key benefit of using drone technology and the specialized photogrammetry software is that the data can be imported into BIM or CAD packages in various file formats. This makes integration of the digital 2D/3D data into workflow processes simple.

Tags: Drone Photography, Construction, Site Management

Dassault Systèmes and Delair, a leading supplier of commercial drone solutions have signed a collaboration agreement confirming with the intention to combine Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform, GEOVIA solutions and relevant drone-based technologies developed by Delair, and cooperatively promote these solutions for the mining and construction industries.

“In just a few years, companies of all sized have embraced unmanned aerial vehicles for land and mine surveys. Surveys traditionally performed by personnel often in dangerous conditions are now conducted by drones, eliminating the need to expose surveyors to unnecessary risks. These technologies are also revolutionising how mining companies are using survey data to manage their operations. It’s now possible to automatically fly a drone several times a week to accurately measure stockpile volumes or monitor the progress of a large construction site like a hydroelectric dam without even interrupting the operations,” says Raoul Jacquand, GEOVIA Brand CEO at Dassault Systèmes.

Over recent years, Delair have developed photogrammetry techniques and machine-learning based imagery analytics allowing the high fidelity capture of changing conditions at the surface of large-scale infrastructure projects, which ultimately result in actionable insights. This valuable information, typically generated in the form of large point clouds and photogrammetric scenes, can be further exploited using GEOVIA Surpac or the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. The implementation of technology developed within Dassault Systèmes, allows Delair generated actionable intelligence to inform downstream processes of mining or construction companies.

“As more and more high-resolution aerial imagery is captured and processed, the ability to inject in near real time point clouds in design and planning decisions will differentiate best-class operators from the average ones. This vision of digital continuity from the drone takeoff all the way to models and operational plans is really exciting. Delair and Dassault Systèmes share that vision and our collaboration aims at making it a reality”.

“This cooperation agreement will enable to explore the synergies between the software solutions of both companies for the benefit of the industry processes which are mission-critical to our common customers,” said the statement.

Tags: Mining, Construction, Drone Technology

Drones fitted with infra-red cameras could soon be flying over paddocks helping sheep farmers save newborn lambs.

The drones take thermal images of flocks that can then be used to assess the health of lambs.

The so-called 'lambulance' is a concept devised by a team at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA).

"The ewe and the lamb have a heat signature," lambulance co-creator Andrew Bailey said.

"What we're trying to do is relate that heat signature to the likelihood of success for that animal staying alive."

Mr Bailey wants to develop a smartphone app linked to the drone data so farmers can receive real-time warnings when a lamb is at risk.

"The drones exist already, the thermal imaging exists already. What we're doing is essentially stitching together all that imagery and then making a diagnostic tool to go with it," he said.

Tasmanian merino farmer Rae Young said she thought the technology was a great idea.

"We'll always embrace new technology," Ms Young said.

"But I think the uses for something like that to go around and check your lambing ewes will be fantastic over time."

Ms Young watched test flights of a TIA drone over one of her flocks.

She said she thought the heat-sensing drones could also diagnose ewes with mastitis — a bacterial infection of the udder.

"If its got mastitis it'll have an infection [and] it'll be hotter, and if a drone can find that earlier on in the piece that'd be fantastic as well," she said.

Mrs Young and her husband Lindsay have 4,000 lambs on their farm near Ross in Tasmania's Midlands.

Their lamb mortality rate is approximately 8 per cent or 320 lamb deaths a year.

At an average sale price of about $150 per lamb, mortality costs the farm about $50,000 a year in lost revenue.

Frank Chester, president of the Marino Breeders Association of Tasmania, said some farms have mortality rates as high as 20 per cent, and that would make a lambulance cost effective.

"You don't have to save a lot of lambs to pay for the technology," Mr Chester said.

The lambulance is a finalist in this week's Australian eChallenge — a competition for entrepreneurs run by Adelaide University.

The competition is designed to help start-ups get their products market-ready, with grants of $10,000 on offer to the best entrants.

Mr Bailey now has to pitch his concept in a scenario similar to those faced by contestants on the TV show Shark Tank.

"Which is new ground for a sheep officer to go into a shark area," he said.

Mr Bailey believes the Lambulance would have applications right across the livestock sector.

"If all goes well, we could have something in the marketplace within the next 12 months," he said.

The eChallenge winners will be announced on Thursday night.

Tags: Thermal Imaging, Agriculture, Drone Photography

TORONTO — Real estate markets across the country may be showing signs of softening, but home stager Monique Shaw says her business has been booming.

“People were using staging as a way to sell in a hot market,” said the owner of Homes Beautifully by Monique Shaw in Calgary.

“But we’re still finding the opposite too. The market isn’t as red hot and it’s becoming more of a buyers’ market now than a sellers’ market then, but we’re doing a lot more vacant staging. We’re just as busy.”

Although housing markets may be off the price peaks seen in the spring of 2017, not all related industries stand to lose when property prices head lower. From staging services to renovation companies to drone operators, some industries that support the real estate market expect demand to remain strong. 

Shaw says she’s seen a recent uptick in business, as homeowners invest more into selling a home because properties can often sit unsold longer on the market. She charges $2100 for the first month for a fully-staged property, and a discounted rate for each following month the house remains on the market.

The latest data from the Canadian Real Estate Association signals that a weakening in markets like Toronto and Vancouver is starting to attribute to lower national home sales.

In October, national home sales fell for the second time in a row while the average price for a sold home came in just under $496,800, down 1.5 per cent compared with a year ago.

Shaw, who is a trained interior designer, says a downturn in the Canadian oil-patch over the past three years has left many landlords scrambling to offload their rentals when tenants lost their jobs.

“When you have an empty property, that’s all it appears to be — empty and a property,” she said. “When you stage that home, it becomes a home. It looks like a home. You can imagine yourself in it. You can imagine yourself living in it.”

David Foster, who is with the Canadian Home Builders’ Association, says a weaker real estate market can also mean more demand for renovations as homeowners forgo a move up due to lack of supply.

“Renovation is seen as the affordable option when someone can’t get their dream home either because they can’t afford it or it’s not available,” said Foster, whose group represents 8,600 contractor firms across the country.

“They start thinking, ‘What can I do to make this house better? Maybe it’s a bathroom reno.'” 

The CHBA says home renovations was a $77 billion industry in Canada in 2017.

Foster says home improvements are often done within the first two years of purchasing a home, but they also remain a popular option for those who want to wait out a slow market in undersupplied cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

“Affordability is still a huge issue and supply is still a huge issue,” he said. “When people see home prices are softening, they’re inclined not to sell and instead wait and see what happens next. In the meantime, that might mean improving their current home.”

Drone pilot Misha Herschorn doesn’t anticipate a quieter real estate market will ground the videography business he started last year.

The majority of business from First Class Drones comes from commercial clients who often want to showcase the size of a property lot, but he’s also getting more jobs from real estate agents representing luxury properties.

Herschorn says the commissions realtors receive when selling high-end properties make paying for drone photos and videos worth the cost of doing business — even in a slowing real estate market.

Tags: Drone Photography, Real Estate, Housing

DJI, Peugeot, and the Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt partner to bring you the Drone Film Festival for 2018 and 2019. There are four categories in which you can submit your video: Sports, Landscape, Story Telling and Experimental. The festival is in its third year now. Last year it had over 400 films submitted. The twelve finalists will be invited to Frankfurt in Spring 2019 in the Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt for the grand finale. Another drone film festival that might interest you is the NYC Drone Film Festival.

PEUGEOT DRONE FILM FESTIVAL 2018-19

The use of drones in conjunction with high-quality digital film cameras opens up completely new creative possibilities for the filmmaker at a very low cost. Together with its partners DJI and Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt, PEUGEOT has dedicated its own festival to this new film genre and has brought the development of this technique closer to filmmakers, creating an audience for these types of films, showing the use of state-of-the-art film technology as a gain and a new opportunity for creatives. After a festival 2016 with great inspiration for filmmakers, a festival 2017 with more than 400 submitted films, breathtaking recordings and high-quality film art, the festival starts its third edition.

THE COMPETITION

From 15 May 2018 filmmakers and drone pilots can submit films. The competition consists of four categories, in each category the jury chooses the best three. The jury is led by festival director Marie Bäumer and consists of actress Lisa Maria Potthoff, actor Simon Schwarz, director and Grimme award winner Stephan Wagner and three directors of the Federal Association of Film and Television Directors in Germany. The twelve finalists will be invited to Frankfurt in Spring 2019 in the Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt for the grand finale.

GRAND FINAL

The grand finale of the PEUGEOT DRONE FILM FESTIVAL will take place in Spring 2019 at the new luxury hotel The Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt. The twelve finalists will be invited to Frankfurt. The winners of the categories and the Grand Prix of all submissions will be announced by the jury. All finalists will also receive a three-day intensive and creative training with the drone specialists from DJI, the jury and Marie Bäumer.

AWARD

The Grand Prix of the PEUGEOT DRONE FILM FESTIVAL is a six-week drone filming event – free of choice: the winner will get for six weeks two free PEUGEOT travelers including running costs, a DJI drone with extensive equipment and EURO 5,000 for travel costs.

DJI, Peugeot, and the Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt partner to bring you the Drone Film Festival for 2018 and 2019. There are four categories in which you can submit your video: Sports, Landscape, Story Telling and Experimental. The festival is in its third year now. Last year it had over 400 films submitted. The twelve finalists will be invited to Frankfurt in Spring 2019 in the Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt for the grand finale. Another drone film festival that might interest you is the NYC Drone Film Festival.

PEUGEOT DRONE FILM FESTIVAL 2018-19

The use of drones in conjunction with high-quality digital film cameras opens up completely new creative possibilities for the filmmaker at a very low cost. Together with its partners DJI and Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt, PEUGEOT has dedicated its own festival to this new film genre and has brought the development of this technique closer to filmmakers, creating an audience for these types of films, showing the use of state-of-the-art film technology as a gain and a new opportunity for creatives. After a festival 2016 with great inspiration for filmmakers, a festival 2017 with more than 400 submitted films, breathtaking recordings and high-quality film art, the festival starts its third edition.

THE COMPETITION

From 15 May 2018 filmmakers and drone pilots can submit films. The competition consists of four categories, in each category the jury chooses the best three. The jury is led by festival director Marie Bäumer and consists of actress Lisa Maria Potthoff, actor Simon Schwarz, director and Grimme award winner Stephan Wagner and three directors of the Federal Association of Film and Television Directors in Germany. The twelve finalists will be invited to Frankfurt in Spring 2019 in the Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt for the grand finale.

GRAND FINAL

The grand finale of the PEUGEOT DRONE FILM FESTIVAL will take place in Spring 2019 at the new luxury hotel The Diaoyutai Mansion Frankfurt. The twelve finalists will be invited to Frankfurt. The winners of the categories and the Grand Prix of all submissions will be announced by the jury. All finalists will also receive a three-day intensive and creative training with the drone specialists from DJI, the jury and Marie Bäumer.

AWARD

The Grand Prix of the PEUGEOT DRONE FILM FESTIVAL is a six-week drone filming event – free of choice: the winner will get for six weeks two free PEUGEOT travelers including running costs, a DJI drone with extensive equipment and EURO 5,000 for travel costs.

IF AT FIRST you don’t succeed, try, try again.

That was the angle many news outlets took this week with a viral video of a brown bear mother and cub. Shot by Dmitry Kedrov this summer with a drone on the coast of Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, the video shows a baby bear repeatedly climbing up and falling down a treacherous, snowy slope.

And though the video has a happy ending—the cub makes it to the top, and the duo walk off into the wilderness—numerous scientists have expressed concerns on social media about the way the video was shot.

For instance, at just over one minute into the video, the camera zooms extremely close to the bears. At the same time, the mother appears to look directly at the remote-controlled helicopter, and even appears to swat at the device—which then seems to cause the cub to fall back down the slope.

Kedrov told a Russian website that the zoom effect was done in post-production and that his drone did not scare the animals in any way. But some experts aren’t so sure.

“It could be a zoom on the video camera, but most consumer drones don't have the payload capacity to carry a camera with a high quality zoom lens,” says Mark Ditmer, a wildlife ecologist at Boise State University who has studied the physiological impact drones have on black bears. “I could be wrong, but I would have to guess this is the drone approaching rapidly and the mother panicking and swatting out of fear.”

“You look at the mother bear in that video and she’s staring straight at the drone for chunks of time,” Sophie Gilbert, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Idaho. “From her perspective it’s literally a UFO. It’s an unidentified flying object.”

“She has no idea what it’s doing. She’s probably never seen anything like it in her life. She’s got a very young cub with her, and of course her response is going to be fear,” Gilbert says.

In fact, the presence of the drone—and the desire to flee from it—could explain why the mother and her cub are traversing such treacherous terrain to begin with; Mothers with such young offspring usually avoid difficult travels unless necessary.

The sound and the flurry

While the details of this particular incident are still coming out, there are many other videos online that show the effects drones can have on wildlife.

Gilbert points to videos of drones hovering above brown bears eating salmon, of a wolf attacking a moose, and of pronghorn antelope apparently trying to escape a low-flying drone as examples of where the machines are actually influencing the behavior of the animals.

“I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around drones being flown, but they’re really loud,” says Gilbert, who conducted a review of how drones are being used in research in 2016. While some of these videos have soundtracks, many of them peaceful, “that is not how it sounds in real life.”

Noise alone can take a toll on wild animals. It distracts them from other necessary functions, like eating or competing for mates. In some animals, these machines may trigger a fight or flight response, while others show increased vigilance like they would in the presence of a predator. And some animals appear not to be affected at all.

Looks can be deceiving, however. In Ditmer’s study from 2015, he was able to show that while most black bears didn’t run away or react in obvious ways to drones flying overheard, their heartrates were going through the roof.

“Large spikes in heart rate indicate a stress response,” he explains. “In the most extreme example we saw bear's heart rate increase from 41 beats per minute prior to the drone flight to 162 beats per minute when the drone was overhead.”

And while it’s true that bears and other creatures can handle a quick heartbeat now and again, Ditmer notes that wild animals are already under a lot of stress trying to find enough food and avoid predators.

What’s more, humans are adding to this stress load all the time as we continue to encroach into wild areas, piling on still more noise with cars, airplanes, ships, and oil and gas extraction.

Flying drones safely

One thing that was clear after speaking with several experts is that nobody is saying we should ban all drones.

“After reading some of the comments on the bear video, I am concerned that people demonize drones,” says Margarita Mulero-Pázmany, a lecturer in unmanned aerial vehicles at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom. “That would be a mistake. We should not blame the tool just because it can be misused.”

Instead, we should develop best practices for scientists, hobbyists, and outdoors-enthusiasts alike that protect both animals and people.

In a review she conducted in 2016, Mulero-Pázmany suggests that drone operators avoid flying at animals head-on, as this is thought to be most threatening. Similarly, all flights should be as short and discrete as possible, while using models are smaller and electric which are much quieter than larger, gas-powered drones. Altitude is also key, and operators should strive to stay as high above the scene as possible while still gathering useful data.

Finally, care should be taken to avoid endangered species, animals that may be more vulnerable to drone presence like those that fly or who have evolved to fear aerial predators, and to never interfere with animals during sensitive times in their life cycle, such as breeding seasons.

“I think it’s a double-edged sword,” says Gilbert. On the one hand, when drones are operated correctly, there’s a chance to help people feel more connected with wildlife, which she says is extremely important for conservation outcomes.

But people also need to remember that animals have their own lives, needs, and fears to attend to, and we “need to not interfere,” Gilbert says.