“Several startups are developing a new generation of autonomous aerial vehicles that more closely resemble airplanes than the small quadcopters that currently dominate the consumer drone industry. The companies hope that advances in the technology can help them snuff out wildfires — sometimes even before they start,” reports NBC News:
Their efforts are taking on fresh urgency as historically devastating wildfires rage in Los Angeles, but they might face regulatory and logistical challenges before getting fully off the ground.
One company developing firefighting drones, the United Kingdom-based Windracers, is one of 29 teams that were selected to participate in an $11 million competition put on by XPRIZE, a nonprofit group that seeks to spur technological development. The company’s drones, which have already seen use in Ukraine to carry cargo, have a wingspan of 30 feet and can work in swarms to monitor large swaths of land for wildfires and drop flame suppressants.
A fire department in the U.K. tested Windracers’ drones last August, praising the speed of the drones’ response. The company built its drones to suppress a fire within 10 minutes, before it grows out of control. With existing methods, the response time can be hours.
Artificial intelligence recently spotted a wildfire in a canyon in California’s Orange County, and alerted firefighters, who were able to put out the fire before it could spread widely.
Drones are also providing vaccines to immunize hundreds of thousands of children in the African nations of Ghana and Kenya, protecting them against potentially lethal diseases.
On some American farms, there are drones with artificial intelligence that spray fungicides to kill pests. As Bloomberg News notes, “These aerial acrobats use less than a tenth of the energy of ground tractors — and they don’t squash the crops, rut the earth or even touch the soil.”
Robots with artificial intelligence will reduce the need for weed-killer and pesticides by more precisely targeting weeds and pests. That will cut farmers’ costs, and radically reduce the size of the crop chemical industry, because robots will use up to 90% less spray to kill the same number of weeds and pests. Some robots using artificial intelligence can identify and kill 100,000 weeds per hour.
Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms.
