Showing posts with label drones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drones. Show all posts

Drones Used to Control Sharks in Australia

Australians tend to be early adopters of new technology because they have inquisitive minds. Our old enemy, the shark, will always be around, so it is not surprising that drone technology is being used to solve this problem.
Shark caught by baited hook attached to a drum
It is not the buzzing sound that will scare sharks off. Drones are being used to gather visual information about where sharks are and the number swimming around, the theory being that if we know this we can be more careful.

At the moment hooks are baited on lines attached to floating drums. This method is a simple way to catch sharks, but other creatures are also caught such as dolphins. Unfortunately, sharks not tempted by the bait remain in the area. Baited hooks have warning devices in them that notify watchers on a boat when sharks take them.

This is a clumsy way to keep sharks at bay. Targeting sharks observed by drones is a better solution. Drones are far cheaper than helicopters and do a better job, going right down to sea level to collect data.
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Useful Drones for Conservation

Despite the fairytale stuff put forward about delivering things to houses in built up areas of large cities, drone can be useful. Patrolling of protected regions for environmental damage is efficient and less costly than other methods.

Conservation Drones a US company is mass producing drones to meet projected demand. Accidents will occur even though the drones will not land away from the operator, but injuries should be rare. Drones zooming around above our head will become the norm. Will there be complaints? Yes there will.

The first major project will be to protect elephants in Africa. The distance that drones can travel will have to be significantly improved to do the job properly. At the moment helicopters are used. These can be expensive as well. They do have better range, however.

Maximum range for non-military drones is about 40kms. High resolution videos can be taken. Preprogramming is possible to carry out surveillance and data collection. A test to monitor frigate birds has been successful in Western Australia.
Conservation by Ty Buchanan
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Drone Deliveries Are Out of This World

As if courier deliveries in Australia are not unreliable enough - they don't send out parcels and expect you to pick up from the depot - there is an attempt to deliver with no driver! Yes, the era of drone delivery is upon us it seems.

Next year Zookal will deliver text books from the University of Sydney directly to your mobile phone location. This is ludicrous. Can you imagine the congestion over cities with drones flying everywhere with no control. Why do we need air traffic controllers? They are essential to maintain safety of course.

Students are saying it will be good to receive university library books by drone. However, some scholarly books have more than 1,000 pages and are extremely heavy. Drones will have to be enormous to carry these. Crashes will be frequent with damage to buildings and those spinning blades will cause personal injury. Note, they will head to a phone and cannot see people.

Zookal assumes their concept will be accepted by Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA). They may insist on a control system. This will cancel out any potential profit. I cannot believe that CASA can possible agree to flooding the lower sky with drones darting about all over the place.

At the moment only emergency services use drones, so there are very few drones flying in the same geographic zones. Let us hope common sense prevails. Domino's Pizza recently delivered a Pizza by drone. This was a test and it ended at that point. Collision avoidance systems in drone is unreliable at the moment. When faced with a large flat wall like on a skyscraper they usually crash into it.
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Society by Ty Buchanan
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Mosquitoes Fly on After Being Hit by Raindrops

Mosquitoes are extremely robust. They can survive being hit by raindrops 50 times their size. The insect is knocked down a little by the raindrop travelling at 300 times normal gravity, but it recovers and flies on.

This attribute was discovered by videoing insects actually being hit by raindrops from artificial rain. There was no improvement in stopping the spread of malaria. Better ways of designing tiny flying robots was enhanced, however, because rain tends to knock mechanical drones off course. Even aeroplanes are detrimentally affected by rain.

The raindrops on mosquitoes tests were exciting to watch. As the rain hit them they dropped, then recovered and sheltered on the wall of the test area. They fell an average of 13 body lengths. Nearly all hits were glancing blows which made mosquitoes roll, pitch and yaw. A direct hit led to a fall of 20 body lengths.

The theory is that mosquitoes are so small the speed of raindrops falling to earth is not affected, This means little energy is transferred to mosquitoes by collisions.
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Science
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