DJI Drone Rescue Map
enterprise.dji.com
enterprise.dji.com
I've recently acquired a drone for security at the rural property I work/live at. A few evenings a week post-covid we get car loads of men from regional suburbs who use the countryside roads as their hangouts, drag strips, and subwoofer test ranges, or couples having sex in their cars. When a group of 4-6 men are hanging out at the edge of your property in front of your house at night with no police presence for about 20 miles, using a drone to make it clear they aren't alone or invisible usually gets them to go somewhere else and discourages them from coming back. Aftermarket LED/strobe lights enable later flights as well.
It's pretty dystopian, but really, the flights and video collect data for making a policy case for doing something about the issue in the township, and if the lurkers don't respect privacy and rural norms and police resources are too thin, this is a lot safer and less time consuming than rolling up on a group of strange men at night to tell them that treating our neighbourhoods as lawless is abusive and brings danger into the area.
This is to say the tension in that dynamic is only going to get more intense as the effect of policies of rapid change. The use case for drones and robots of various kinds will be to replace and intermediate what was previously an equillibrium of cultural norms. Today, GPT enabled android human-scarecrows are just a product launch away, where everyone gets their own mall cop. When there was mutual respect and understanding, we didn't need fences and barriers, but without that, technology like this rapidly becomes economical. Very strange times indeed.
Often, the point of driving the vehicle is effectively to do damage, recreational slides, drifts, spinning out, etc are all normal behaviors for off readers and the environmental damage done is often extreme and long lasting, while damage to animals, crops /trees, property, and roadways can often run into the tens of thousands of dollars for a group of “off road enthusiasts” frolicking for 20 minutes.
For the most part (with exceptions of course) the people (in the USA) that you end up dealing with that go on private property thinking they are “in the middle of nowhere” are doing so with no intention of being in any way responsible for their actions. The intention is often rather to “cut loose” aka engage in behaviors that would be considered too destructive, annoying, or illegal to do in a place where you might be held accountable for the consequences of your decisions.
IMHO this is an unhealthy memetic crystal common in US culture especially (but hardly exclusively) — the idea of costless externalization of costs and consequences.
It goes hand in hand with the tacit approval of theft when the amount involved is large enough. “Oceans Eleven” wouldn’t be nearly as cool if they were skillfully stealing televisions from suburban homes lol.
*Well of course people do, just as people hike in the USA. But in both cases it's something the vast majority of people don't do and that's totally fine.
I don't live rurally but I would guess this isn't a very new concept. "Makeout point" has been around for a while. (not that it makes it any less annoying)
Maybe I should just lease a failing golf course in the area and charge nighttime admission as a makeout park.
Do you mean inside your property at its' edge?
Drones are good at covering terrain that's difficult to traverse on foot. Canyons, cliff walls, the like. As some of the rescues on the site show, they're also good for getting another angle that's not human-being eye level, which is sometimes all you need to spot a clue or subject.
Drones are not very good at covering large areas of ground quickly. It's also extremely difficult to spot anything small than an entire human being on the drone's camera. That means you miss valuable things like bootprints, pieces of equipment, etc.
They're a very useful tool in the toolbox, but I don't see them replacing human beings until image recognition technology gets another level-up. "Recognize a human being or signs of one with the background of literally any possible terrain on Earth" is a bit beyond what's field-deployable at the moment.
One of the articles mentioned a local fire dept had a drone with thermals which helped find a 14yr old boy lost in a remote area. That would certainly help. From the videos I’ve seen from Ukraine thermals are a huge advantage for finding people.
Give it time, I'd say. Only a matter of time before there's drones autonomously mapping out big areas and computers assembling the data.
I work with imaging drones in agriculture and every time we run the numbers the answer is almost always fixed wing. We have multirotors that have no problem flying at 80+km/h, but the battery life kills our ability to cover broad areas of land without having to land and swap batteries. With fixed-wing you get (depending on many factors) a ~10:1 efficiency improvement but also need significantly more skill as a pilot and potentially more infrastructure (e.g. a viable runway of some kind). VTOL fixed wings have some potential, but the takeoff and landing burns so much battery that you lose a lot of the advantages of the fixed wing.
There are some practicality points to it. For example, their system works awesome when you have a fixed base but might be impractical when launching with gear that's towable with half-ton truck.
If you want to discuss the bad things about DJI, talk about their abhorrent privacy, or how they provided Russia with tools to locate and target Ukrainian DJI drone users.
I really like my DJI drone, it's almost too good to the point it's boring. But it's still easy to be concerned about the political issues with the company, and in some cases the company has overstepped it's boundaries a bit too far in terms of choosing safety. Their setup is basically setup for false positives where a false positive means you can't use the drone at all in a place where it is actually legal to fly if you follow the local laws.
In essence, it walks, talks, and acts like a Western company because it was founded in a part of China explicitly designed to encourage Western-style capitalism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin...
To me what's scary about this isn't that they're Chinese, but that American manufacturing had fallen so far behind that in a few short years a college student with some $100k in funding from a family friend, plus a bit of marketing, was able to create, defend, and expand a global drone empire while all our companies tried and died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI?wprov=sfla1
Either amazing zoom and lenses on that drone, or the pilot has great eyesight. Either way, interesting story and glad to hear a life was saved.
The DJI RC Pro has a live HDMI feed allowing others to watch the footage on a larger screen.
For example, I like to compare snapshots to a rolling greyscale 3s average image and extract contours around large diffs. This still yields lots of noise (moving shadows are the worst!), but I don't need realtime answers and have a relatively fixed domain. This let me add models like CLIP to search out specific known false positives (and known good positives) to improve detection quality.
A moving camera, obviously has no fixed frame of reference to detect motion. As such, your heuristics need to change, and they'll get considerably more complex (and computationally expensive). Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely wouldn't even be based on OpenCV.
If anyone has a starting point, please do share.
They know their drones are being used to drop bombs; they don't want to be associated with that publicly.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/tech/dji-drone-sales-susp...
It's not a new phenomenon, either. The RNLI has operated without government funding for 199 years.
British police have been enthusiastic adopters of drones due to ongoing budget constraints. Drones are a lower-cost alternative to helicopters or large search teams.
British geography is well suited to small quadcopters. Helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft are much better suited to SAR operations in large unpopulated areas, but a quadcopter is often a better solution if you're searching a small area with dense terrain.
Britain has an exceptionally large number of CCTV cameras, which has created a base of knowledge and experience in using remotely-operated cameras as part of a search operation.
The Civil Aviation Authority has taken a relatively progressive approach to drone regulation. It's fairly easy to get licensed as a professional operator, and comparatively straightforward for those operators to get permission to fly in potentially high-risk scenarios (e.g. night flying over a densely populated area in controlled airspace).
Not a map but a few places - https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/04/conflict-g... (2021)
Edit: no need to bring warfare drones into the discussion: https://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-cont...
(Although the more interesting/worrying case is the recent use of weaponized hobby-grade quadcopters in the Ukraine war, a tactic that could potentially be used by terrorists outside of warzones)
Everyone's always talking about the benefits of seatbelts, but it's just a distraction by big seatbelt to deflect from the harm seatbelts cause. All these "statistics" and "studies" about people surviving maybe because they were restrained are just to cover up the fact that some people are burned alive in crashes because they can't get out of these aforementioned restraints! Any discussion of the benefits of seatbelts exists only to spit on their graves.
in reality, people AREN'T all talking about the benefits or costs of seatbelts, because there's been virtually universal agreement on both as of decades ago
in reality, people ARE talking about the harms of drones and guns, and dismissing such harms by deflecting to unrelated benefits rather than directly addressing the harms seems disingenuous, and not a balanced discussion, much less one around what people are actually discussing: the harms
there could be a million benefits of something, but none of them presented is a direct addressing of any given harm of that thing
In the EU countries, they are heavily regulated. You can't even fly them over your own property without registering them first and forget about flying over other people's property. Think you can just hide in the bushes? DJI is selling special equipment to airport security and law enforcement to track and identify their drones.
Drones used in war or for terrorism/espionage might be a different topic. That is definitely a problem.
This was not difficult to find:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/paparazzi-use-dr...
> When Tina Turner got married at her estate in Switzerland over the weekend, she wanted to keep paparazzi away. But photographers used drones and other aircraft to get the exclusives they needed. The battle for pictures is increasingly moving into the airspace.
It's powerful enough and inconspicuous enough to be a pest, no doubt. In my jurisdiction at least, using any size drone for "peeping" (violating someone's privacy in general) is illegal.
At least in Germany. Should be true for the whole EU, though some countries might implement the laws a little bit differently.
And, no, the mini 2 does not have optical zoom. Don't know where you got that information.