I had the distinct honor of both keynoting & judging the outstanding Drones for Good Challenge in Dubai last week (see my live reports). Teams from all around the world came to the UAE to compete. Some of the drones that took to the sky were truly remarkable. The winner of the National Prize, for example, was theWadi Drone built by the NYU Abu Dhabi Team who took home the one million Dirham reward ($273,000). While designed to support important conservation efforts in the region, the novel solution afforded by this innovative drone could also be used to support humanitarian relief efforts.
The ultralight Wadi Drone can fly for 1.5 hours across some 40km of the Wadi Wurayah National Park, which is the “UAE’s first mountain protected national park. The drone collects data from 120 camera traps that capture images of wild animals at the park” (1). Thanks to Wadi Drone, rangers no longer have to hike through the park (often facing temperatures upwards of 45 degrees Celsius) to manually collect the SD cards from each of the 120 cameras scattered across the area. Instead, the drone simply flies over the cameras and uploads the pictures directly to an onboard memory card (check out video here). To date, these cameras have enabled park rangers and conservationists to identify more than 800 specifies, such as foxes, wildcats and lynxes.
What if we used the Wadi Drone to collect relevant data from humanitarian base camps in the field during disasters? Connectivity and bandwidth can often be an issue in these situations. Could we use a version of the Wadi Drone to collect data on damage assessments, resulting needs, etc., along with pictures directly from the field? Laptops and/or smartphones could simply be retrofitted to push relevant data to the drone flying overhead, which would then return to HQ where (hopefully) a more solid Wifi or 3G/4G connection is available.
Am I completely off here, or is this something worth exploring? I hope my more seasoned humanitarian colleagues will chime with some of their thoughts. Is there a role for data-carrying drones in the humanitarian space? Keep in mind that drones are not immune to Moore’s Law.
Comments
Hi All here's what I received from the Wadi Drone team, in case of interest:
Wadi Drone website
Some more info
http://conservationdrones.org/2015/02/12/data-mule-drone-is-the-nat...
Reminds me of the Motorbike Email delivery system using Wifi in Store and Forward sys...
Hi All, I've told the team from Wadi Drone that you had questions and pointed them to your comments. Hopefully they'll be able to answer them soon.
We just radio link the camera traps in a daisy chain and pull the images as they happen. But very often its a plan to actually go and look at the path that animals are travelling to collect hair/dung and check out the footprints to try and see how they are living. Creating a better network for sensors on the ground gives you all weather H24 operation. In South Africa we use high sites to create that network with stuff hanging off that. The furthest animal from capture point is currently living 160km away and we repurposed a sheep tracking unit that heard our signal to pull in our data as well. Camera traps are easy to service as they are fixed.
I would be interested in the power train as well. If the plane they are using is what is pictured, that is definitely a Penguin. The size of the battery, the motor, and prop specs would be nice to have. It looks stock otherwise while the inside, I'm sure, has much more in it.
+1 Tridge. No doubt a great concept but I would like to see them share some technical data with the community about how they achieved what they claim. From the video is is hard to gauge the current state the project. Is it purely conceptual at this stage, have they done any successful field trials or is the system deployed? I have lots of questions!
Beyond the comms, what powertrain are they using to achieve 1.5 hours flight time (in potentially 45C conditions) carrying the payload? Are they using the Cyclops-E or the Penguin airframe? Is 40km the maximum telemetry range or just the flight line distance?
How does the UAV initiate communication with the camera trap periodically without draining the camera trap's battery for the long periods it is deployed idle?
Great operational concept, I'm sure it has lots of potential in countries that aren't trying to stifle UAS use.
This is a very nice concept, but I'm surprised WiFi on a RPi has sufficient range to upload the images reliably from the camera traps to the aircraft circling above. Do you know what WiFi hardware is being used? In the video they also talk about uploading with an XBee, which would be extremely slow, assuming the images aren't very small.