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Utilising drones in this way means that not only are humans now freed up from the dangerous job of mine sweeping, but drones can complete the task much quicker and, sensors permitting, much more effectively. Drones in the future As mentioned earlier, drone use in warfare is still in its infancy. Yet broader developments are already on the horizon which could further increase their applicability. As AI has reclaimed its place in the public imagination with the explosion of the likes of ChatGPT, its future applications have many thinking about what it can add to these unmanned aerial vehicles. Imagine, instead of sending the drone up to collect data for you to collate and analyse later, AI analyses the drone feed in real-time. The additional insights gained in a reconnaissance flight, or the time saved clearing a mind field could prove decisive in some situations. “It’s certainly not at the point where you fly a mission and you know, the computer brain site says, ‘Oh, this is a T35 tank mine’. It's not there yet. The primary reliance is on the mapping and human interpretation stuff,” Chell explains. “But it is moving there very, very quickly.”
a custom order company, and it works with customers to make drones to their specifications. One of the drones that was used to aid the police in the homicide investigation had all the tools to make it fit for another purpose – mine detection. These types of drones use a number of different systems to help troops on the ground clear the land of mines. A drone will take off, fly to a height of 8,000ft, and map the land below to search for mines. “They can see where trails had been walked, they can see where there's a brush that's been disturbed, they can see where there's roads that are more used than other roads,” Chell explains. This is because drones like Draganfly’s are equipped with stabilised RGB cameras with 10x zoom which can capture detailed footage of the ground below and spot inconsistencies as well as hyperspectral sensors which looks at objects using a vast portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to enable identification of the materials that make up a scanned object. Thermal infrared can also spot heat discrepancies in different areas of the ground and even penetrate the ground looking for mines that emit a pulse – recording the echoes that result from subsurface objects. All this data is then ‘mapped’ by Draganfly’s software and compiled into one dataset for analysis. This paints a detailed picture for officials who can implement strategies from the analysed data.
28 ELECTRONICSPECIFIER.COM
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