Animal Herding & Other Arbitrary Drone Uses
When I think of the consumer technologies that would really impress someone 20 years ago, I think of VR, 3D printing, and Drones. Each of these fit into a unique category: Less than one paycheck and you can live a sci-fi dream. I've written about 3D printing before (I may upload some old posts here), and I actively work in VR research, so I thought it was about time to talk about drones.
Drones have become increasingly popular. The most common application at a consumer level is drone camera footage. Programmable and controllable paths anywhere in 3D space are an easy sell to cinematographers, hobbyists, and professionals alike. Drone racing is a niche, but very interesting to watch; hobby (and FPV) drone racing fuses two, and sometimes all three, of my favorite sci-fi consumer products. Drone warfare has become an increasingly significant topic, especially in Ukraine.
But the theoretical applications of cheap drones are much greater than just these few things. Drone technologies and applications are pretty widespread now, and there is no shortage of startups or big companies looking into how they can best be used for profit. This post explores some less intuitive applications of drones. Once you remove the specifics of flying, drones are fundamentally a way of tracing almost any 3D path on Earth, with the ability to attach a payload. Increasingly sophisticated onboard processing (edge computing) allows these paths to be defined semantically (e.g., 'follow this road') rather than just geometrically (pure coordinates). This is what makes it interesting.
Application 1) Data Mule/ SneakerNet Drones
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
The Sneakernet is the concept of moving data by physically moving the storage from one place to the next. There are a variety of reasons to do this, safety and political access being two common ones, but as the quote and image above illustrate, it can also be faster for transferring sufficiently large files. The advantage of Sneakernets diminishes over time as internet speeds become faster, but as working file sizes also become larger, the threshold at which it's faster might be higher than you expect. I've done some quick calculations in a chart below, showing at what distances, file sizes, and internet speeds a pretty fast drone can get information to you faster than the internet.
Negative Values indicate combinations where internet will always be faster than physical transfer
This suggests that if you're in the same city and transferring over a reasonably sized file or set of files, it's often faster via drone. If you're working on a documentary with a friend (6 hours of 4K footage), and you're in Bushwick while they live in the Upper East Side, it might take only about 15-20 minutes to SneakerNet a drone with the hard drive there. Conversely, it would take about 6.5 hours to upload it with NYC's slightly faster average speed of 32 Mbps.
Application 2) Herding
Videos of talented shepherd dogs never cease to amaze me. The way they know how to move in exactly the right pattern to push all these sheep to exactly the right position is incredibly impressive. Aerial footage (funnily enough from drones) is beautiful to look at. But we can imagine the drones doing the herding instead of the filming. I don't imagine drones would be much more effective than dogs for something like large herds of sheep, but you can imagine a more one-on-one herding method.
Example 1) The Lost Dog Tracker. Simply enough, a drone could quite easily track a chipped dog or cat. A smart enough drone could even attempt to make loud noises to either direct the pet towards the owner or away from danger. If the loud noise method doesn't work, a treat attached to it, leading it back to the owner might work equally as well.
Example 2) Wild Animal Tracker. Specific wild animals could easily be targeted and herded, in the same way that pets might be. Specific interventions could also be done by a stealthy enough drone. For example, targeted vaccines, tracking chips, or sedatives could be applied using something like a dart gun.
Example 3) High Speed Chase Drone. Imagine: a high-speed chase turns into an on-foot pursuit. Police drones aren't sci-fi and have seen use in a handful of countries, so the possibility of using a drone to track a suspect is not new. However, I have not heard of using drones or a series of drones to create a 'herding' behavior before. Rather than simply following from a safe distance, a drone with flashing lights and a siren or megaphone could cause a suspect to change paths as they attempt to get away from it, functionally herding them in a direction of their choice.
I won't delve into the ethical or logistical implications of any of these, especially regarding the last one; I just want to bring up possible uses that come to mind when thinking about this herding ability.
Application 3) Small Direct P2P Deliveries
There is no shortage of talk about drone delivery services. Between Zipline doing medical deliveries in Ghana, to Amazon's drone delivery experiments, it is clear that replacing some of our day-to-day deliveries with drones offers potential improvements over our current system. However, there is less talk about very direct P2P microdelivery services. The Part 1 SneakerNet discussion was a variation on this theme, but it has more applications.
What percent of emergency responses actually require the movement of a person? Or rather, what percent of emergency situations require the movement of a person as a first priority? I think there are a lot of emergency situations where responders are a proxy for delivering some sort of material, and sometimes that material is lightweight and easy enough to use that drone delivery is reasonable. Adding in something like a robust telemedicine system, and delivery of EpiPens, Naloxone, Tourniquets, Blood Products, or Specific Poison Antidotes, becomes much more feasible.
P2P Microdelivery as a service is also possible. You forgot your keycard or an important document at home, after an hour's drive to the office. Your spouse is about to leave for work / works from home and so cannot come to drop it off for you. If it's worth it to you, you could have a drone fly to your house for your spouse to put the item in the box, set a known password that they'll text you, and the drone will be at your office in probably half the time (or less if using extra fast drones) than it would've taken you round trip to go get it.
Microdelivery could theoretically be used for legal documents, but that involves regulatory hoops much more than logistical ones. Contracts with necessary wet signatures, process serving with facial recognition, etc, are all potentially feasible with arbitrary drone uses, pending legal and technical solutions.
Application 4) Small Fixes in Hard to Reach Places
Some companies are already looking into drones for window washing of Tall Buildings. This is a great use, taking a job that is much more dangerous than it is difficult, and using robotics to help. Why don't we just extrapolate out drones as a possible solution to all dangerous but not necessarily difficult jobs, such as climbing power towers to replace bulbs? Less realistically, spot repairs such as screwing or welding. Using the same sort of connected wire system that window washing drones use, but for delivering high-power electricity, theoretically an advanced, gyroscopically stabilized drone with some sort of telepresence controlled arm could fix welds in hard-to-reach or high up places.
Soaring Like A Bird and Other Techniques
Quadcopter style drones are the type you're going to see the most of. They're easier to control, have VTOL capabilities, and are generally an obvious form factor. But I'm obligated to talk about the possibilities of Glider style drones, and yes, talk about how we can 'be inspired by nature'.
Many gliding birds use Thermal Soaring to gain lift. If you can gain lift using the energy of the earth for free, you might as well take advantage of it. If you can gain lift and also glide for long horizontal distances with minimal vertical drop, you can essentially go forever. Rather than having to rely on huge breakthroughs in battery tech, a glider style UAV with some automated thermal vent detection/ exploitation system could run off of a comically small amount of energy and have the possibility to go cross country.
The much sexier way to steal energy for flying from the earth is dynamic soaring. Dynamic soaring is a way to exploit the difference in wind speed between two volumes of air to gain speed by looping in and out of them. Some birds do this naturally in air currents caused by oceans, and drones may be able to use that, but the videos I've seen of RC gliders have taken advantage of dynamic soaring on mountain ridges. These sorts of videos are easy to find online, but I will post one here. If you could find good places to take advantage of this, and have the onboard computing necessary to automatically do it, you can get almost sonic levels of speed essentially for free. This plus thermal soaring makes cross country no recharge drones much more reasonable.
An Atlatl, or spear thrower, is a primitive device used to extend the lever arm of your throwing arm to increase the energy imparted onto a spear or dart. One of the main problems with glider style UAVs as compared to Quadcopter style is how to get to takeoff speed. While companies like Zipline use giant slingshots, the most primitive version of this would be just an atlatl, or some sort of crossbow with a crank. I'm imagining hiking up to a mountain to make a cross country delivery of some sort. You take off your backpack, and unfold your flat-packed glider drone to its full size of 7' wingspan. You crank some armless carbon fiber crossbow for a few minutes, put the drone in and pull the trigger. It leaves going 60 mph, finds a thermal vent to circle and gain a few hundred feet of altitude. Once it has sufficient height, it glides to a sharp ridge, where it quickly makes a series of perfect dynamic soaring loops to gain speed, eventually hitting 600 mph and curving off towards its destination.
We have a way to trace any path in the sky, and the price and speed of those paths are only going to improve. It benefits us to think, what do we do with an army of iron birds?