SEND IN THE DRONES
In 2017, three people inexperienced with the Upper Iowa River set out to enjoy a beautiful June day on their inner tubes. As the sun began to fade in the early evening sky, the group began to worry they wouldn’t find a place to exit the river before nightfall.
Stopped on a sandbar, the trio realized their cellphones had no signal. One tuber was suffering from serious back pain. They decided to send one person out through the woods to find help, or at least phone reception.
The tuber made it out to a road she didn’t recognize and called the Decorah (Iowa) Fire Department. She helped first responders track down her location. But when it came time to find the others, the woman had only a vague recollection of the path she’d taken out of the woods.
“She gave them a general direction she thought she came from,” Decorah Fire Chief Mike Ashbacher says. “Had we had to search either by boat or ground, it would have taken us some time. The area was pretty rugged.”
The rescuers didn’t have to do that. Instead, they sent up a drone that found the stranded tubers within minutes. Flying over the treetops, the drone located the river and followed its path.
Once they’d pinpointed the tubers’ location, rescuers brought the drone back and sent it to the tubers again, this time with a note telling them to stay put. From there, first responders drove utility vehicles to their location. “The drone cut our
search time by hours,” Ashbacher says.
That particular drone can carry up to 5 pounds and has been used in several water rescues. It has delivered ropes to stranded boaters, its infrared camera illuminates night searches, and it can drop life preservers to people in danger of being swept away by water.
The Decorah Fire Department, an almost entirely volunteer company that covers 240 square miles in northeastern Iowa, purchased its drone about a year earlier with funds raised in the community. “There will be a day when it will save a life,” Ashbacher says.
REDUCING THE RISK Similar stories are reported across the country. Algona, Iowa, firefighters used a drone to locate a man having a heart attack after he and his granddaughter were stranded on a river while boating. In Mechanic Falls, Maine, an 18-year-old man and 12-year-old boy were delivered life jackets by drone when they were caught on a slippery rock in a raging current.
Drones helped investigate a rash of fires among old buildings in Rockford, Ill., in 2017. Extensive damage made it impossible for firefighters or investigators to enter the structures. In some cases, getting close wasn’t even an option due to the danger of a collapse. A job too risky for people was perfect, however, for a drone.
Police are also using drones to track and capture suspects. Modesto, Calif., police used a drone in 2016 to tail a robbery suspect as he fled and scaled a fence. Thanks to the drone, officers were waiting on the other side.
Increasingly, unmanned aerial vehicles – aka drones – are reducing the amount of time it takes, and the risk involved, in making rescues or arrests. Even routine tasks, such as investigating a fender bender, can be done more quickly and safely with drones.
“There is all manner of use for these with search-and-rescue, as well as accident investigations,” says Brian Wynne, president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for unmanned systems and robotics. “These are very labor-intensive jobs. There are officers out there with tape measures and cars whizzing by them. You can do those measurements in a matter of seconds with a drone from a much safer space.”
Kyle Snyder is director of the NextGen Air Transportation Consortium, a group of experts from academia, industry and government who research aviation technology development at North Carolina State University. He believes that drones soon will be considered standard issue for police, similar to handcuffs and a gun.
“Expect to see every law-enforcement vehicle have one in its trunk to help with scene investigation,” Snyder predicts.
DRONES AT WORK The military’s use of drones has sparked debate about their role in targeting enemy combatants while keeping American servicemembers out of harm’s way. On the domestic front, smaller drones – much more like remote-controlled airplanes – can be purchased for less than $100 in many department stores or online, giving hobbyists hours of enjoyment zipping them around local parks and open fields.
In between are commercial drones that are used by a wide range of operators and businesses, from the Decorah Fire Department to farmers monitoring fields and real-estate agents trying to sell houses.
Those industries are already exploring ways in which they can use data, video and photography from drones, says Trevor Hogan, a firefighter in Rockford and a co-owner of Northern Illinois Vertical Data.
Hogan’s drone has taken video tours of large properties for sale to assist real-estate agents, and flown over building sites to help Hogan determine whether construction progress is matching written plans. He believes that as Americans become more accustomed to seeing drones and their benefits, demand will rise. He also expects drones to play a significant role in agriculture.
Over an 80-acre field, Hogan can take hundreds of pictures and stitch them together on his computer. From the photos, he can see places with high weed pressure that might need herbicide applications or an area in which crops might be in distress, indicating the need for soil nutrient tests. “You can compare these maps with soil samples and soil testing, elevation changes in the field,” he says. “It’s another piece of the puzzle to show why some areas of the field produce more.”
An infrared sensor on a drone can measure chlorophyll content in plants. That data might allow a farmer to apply fertilizer only to field sections that really need it, as opposed to doing a whole-field application.
“The whole field might not need nitrogen but maybe a part of it does, and you can increase that yield 10 to 20 bushels per acre,” said Jerry Hatfield, director of the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, part of the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.
That not only saves the farmer money and time, but it decreases unnecessary fertilizer applications – ultimately reducing the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus causing environmental damage when they reach rivers and streams.
“When it comes down to precision agriculture, you’re not treating the field as a whole,” Hogan says. “You’re making little custom management plans for smaller sections of a field.”
In the future, drones may help improve crops and speed production. Snyder has seen prototypes of drones that can pluck apples from trees. “It’s not routine or mass-produced right now, but there are people showing that you can do those things today,” he says.
RIDING HIGH Hogan is far from alone in exploring opportunities to build business using drones. As more uses for them are developed, business is expected to boom at companies like his nationwide.
“Drones: Reporting for Work,” a 2016 report from Goldman Sachs, estimates that civil governments and businesses may spend $13 billion on drones by 2020. It lists construction, agriculture, insurance claims, offshore oil and gas, police and fire, the Coast Guard, journalism and the Border Patrol as large-growth areas.
“I can’t think of very many segments of the U.S. economy that might not benefit from this tech,” Wynne says. “The applications go on and on.”
Amazon, the online retail giant, drew notice when it floated the idea of delivering packages via drones. “In a rural area, a delivery truck might pull to the end of a driveway and use a drone to deliver to a target on the lawn,” Wynne says. “That saves time and money. Those technologies are being tested as we speak.”
Packages aren’t the only things that might hitch a ride through the skies. Wynne envisions a day when people might hop on a drone on a rooftop in New York City or Chicago to be delivered to another location nearby, avoiding the congested traffic associated with big cities. He’s heard ride-sharing companies discuss how such services could work.
“It’s getting close to ‘Jetsons’ stuff,” Wynne says, referencing the 1960s-era cartoon set in a world of flying cars and robots.
All this is possible, he adds. The sky is the limit, but there are still significant hurdles to overcome before we leap from dropping notes to stranded boaters to dropping passengers at a football game.
SAFETY AND SECURITY Maybe the most significant of those hurdles is safety. While the technology used in drones is advancing rapidly, there are still concerns about the safety of people on the ground. Malfunctions or user error could cause serious damage to a person or property if a drone fell from the sky.
In 2014, the Federal Aviation Administration started granting exemptions to allow companies to use drones to support their businesses but implemented rules to address safety issues. Part 107 specifies, among other things, that the drone must remain in the operator’s line of sight, must not fly over people, must be operated during daylight hours, and cannot exceed certain speeds and heights.
“The one thing we all generally preach is public safety first,” says Bob Gonsalves, president of the U.S. Association of Unmanned Aerial Videographers, a Marietta, Ga.-based organization for commercial drone operators.
That said, Gonsalves adds that the rules hinder the business uses for drones. Oil pipelines, for example, run for miles through uninhabited areas. Using a drone for inspections might require the aircraft to leave the line of sight with little or no risk to anyone.
“The biggest challenge today is that technology is outpacing regulations,” Gonsalves says. “Some regulations going in place today are already outdated by the evolution of the technology.”
He points to geofencing, which uses GPS and radio frequencies to set up invisible barriers that restrict drones to a certain space, to demonstrate that drones can be operated more safely than many believe.
Also, commercial operators spend thousands of dollars on their equipment. They are invested in safety if for no other reason than because they are invested in their businesses.
“Professional, commercial UAV operators, on a whole, are as safe and as responsible as they can be,” Gonsalves says.
Physical safety aside, some also worry about privacy issues as citizens, businesses and government entities use unmanned aircraft with cameras to roam the skies. Social media sites and the Internet are full of stories about neighbors becoming upset when someone flies a drone over their fences or seemingly spies on them.
In 2015, a Kentucky man shot down a drone he said was spying on his teen daughter while she sunbathed in the yard. Concerns over invasion of privacy have led to a number of states and cities creating special laws for drones.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 38 states considered laws pertaining to drones in 2017, and 17 states enacted 23 pieces of legislation, many centered on safety and privacy issues. South Dakota adopted a law that prohibits using a drone to record someone in a place with a reasonable expectation of privacy. Oregon made it illegal to fly a drone over private property in a way that annoys or harasses the property owner.
Others are concerned that drones might get in the way at the wrong time. Indiana enacted a law that creates the crime of “public safety remote aerial interference,” which applies to anyone who uses a drone to obstruct or interfere with law enforcement, firefighters, emergency medical responders or search-and-rescue personnel. A second offense is a felony.
The Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSCT) at Syracuse University documents dozens of local ordinances regulating drones, including a law in Daly City, Calif., that bans drones from public parks, and another in Aberdeen, S.D., that has made it illegal to operate a drone over many public spaces, as well as “over property that the operator does not own” without permission.
Gonsalves said he has long expected privacy to be a major hurdle for drone operators. “Personal privacy is emotionally driven,” he says. “A lot of these local nuisance and privacy laws that we’re starting to see pop up across the country are not based in fact. They’re based in emotion.”
The real issue, Gonsalves says, is not the use of drones. It’s privacy.
“Privacy laws already exist,” he points out. “Don’t focus on the technology. If someone is violating someone else’s personal property, it doesn’t matter if it’s happening with a cellphone, a (digital camera) or a drone. They’re violating someone’s personal space, and there are already laws for that.”
Wynne believes concerns over privacy will start to wane, as they have for other technologies that might allow government entities or businesses to observe someone’s whereabouts. He points to radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, a device that allows vehicles to automatically pay highway tolls without slowing down.
“That’s a lot better than waiting to put your 50 cents into a basket,” Wynne says. “That was years ago that we were talking about that (as a privacy concern). Now we voluntarily let people know where I am and what I’m doing.”
At the end of the day, unmanned vehicles will serve many purposes, and it’s likely that the concerns people have today will go by the wayside once the technology shows its usefulness, he says.
“Ultimately what matters to people is, is it better for me?” Wynne asks. “Right now, it’s getting momentum.”
Brian Wallheimer is a freelance writer whose clients include Purdue University, the University of Chicago and Notre Dame. He lives in Rockford, Ill., with his wife and three children.