Weather Monitoring – Hurricane Hunting
One of the many practical uses that is going to mean a lot for humankind is definitely the weather watching possibility UAVs can provide. NASA, in collaboration with NOAA and Northrop Grumman, is experimenting with drones which can spend over 30 hours in the air. These specific drones are designed for hurricane hunting. This way of hurricane monitoring will greatly help with the possibility of predicting these awful winds, which present grave danger for many people around the world. While NASA is focused on using these big drones, a different team of people at the University of Florida is trying to do the same with super resistant mini drones, which would be used to enter hurricanes and acquire the much needed information regarding the properties of hurricanes such as humidity, pressure and temperature. This drone application will certainly help scientists better understand the way hurricanes form, which may make them predictable in the future.
SAR Missions
Search and rescue missions are going to be performed differently in the future, thanks to these devices. They simply offer much faster coverage of the search terrain and, with the ability of carrying different devices, like heat sensors, these thingies will surely make finding someone much easier and faster. In Canada, a victim of a car crash, being disoriented, had wandered away into the cold night. With the use of a drone, the search took a short time and the person was rescued due to heat sensors equipped on the drone. Not only is this type of SAR mission time friendly, but it also lowers the costs, as SAR missions can be quite expensive, requiring special off road vehicles and a great number of people in some cases. As drones are still a new thing, we can expect a wide usage of these devices in SAR missions within a couple of years.
Wildlife Preservation
In the past, keeping up with the exact numbers of different species was very hard for biologists and scientists in the field. However, with the development of drones, this task is becoming much easier. As drones are quite mobile and silent, it makes them perfect for monitoring wildlife, plus the usual monitoring methods put people in risk, as being close to these animals can be quite dangerous. Google is currently helping WWF, a conservation organization, fend off poachers in Africa, who are putting specific species closer to extinction due to their illegal hunting. Poaching prevention is achieved through surveillance drones which carefully pick up any sort of illegal activity. Drones are also used in mapping the movement of animals, which usually requires a lot of work and funds, not to mention time. As time goes by, scientific discoveries related to animals and the protection of animals are going to greatly improve.
Home Maintenance
Numerous places on the outside of our houses are unreachable and, due to constant weather fluctuations, some changes definitely occur. Leaving these minor faults untreated leads to some serious damage in the long run, which can be quite stressful for our budget. However, with regular use of drones, checking vital parts of the roof or chimney is a piece of cake and, due to high quality cameras located on the drones, noticing any type of damage is easier than ever. This is only one of the technologies which guarantee the improvement of home maintenance and an increase in home safety. As time passes, more people will use this method of checking their home’s state. It will be much easier to assess the damage done by bad weather conditions. Overall, this is great news, as people will no longer have to worry about faults in their homes, as they will easily be up to date with the things that should be fixed.
Agriculture
The use of drones in farming fields is going to save a lot of money and time due to their speed. Farmers are already using these devices to check damages to their plants after a storm, to see if every plant has enough water, and they can now easily check the progress of their crops. All this is possible due to the bird eye perspective of a drone’s video stream, which gives the perfect picture of numerous crop related data. This allows farmers to act fast and minimize the damage done to their crops. Additionally, some agricultural drones are equipped with numerous spraying systems which spray pesticides or fertilizer. Not to mention that drones can access some very inadequate places easily and save the farmer a lot of time. As agricultural drone use is being approved by the FAA, an increasing number of farmers are interested in regularly using these devices to improve their crop maintenance.
Delivery and Marketing
Another interesting concept that other companies went for is drone marketing. Due to the fact that vast skyscrapers have enormous windows, some companies in Russia have performed several marketing campaigns with flyers hanged on drones. The people working could notice the advertisement. As this is a new way of marketing, it is very efficient because it catches the attention of many people in the building. This innovative way of marketing has great potential, due to the fact that the amount of skyscrapers, filled with millions, are rising every day in numerous cities around the world. These are only some of the ways that drones are changing the world at the moment. We can only expect further applications to be introduced later on, as they will certainly change our lives even more. These devices will greatly save the time required for numerous tasks which require a lot of people covering a large area of land, they can come in handy during disasters which cause a lot of material damage, which occur from time to time. The applications are simply endless and we will see what the future holds when it comes to the incorporation of these devices into our everyday lives. Featured photo credit: richmondmediamarketing.com via richmondmediamarketing.com
