“Flock Safety, a tech startup focused on crime detection and prevention, is selling drones to private businesses to help them catch thieves,” reports The Doomslayer.
MIT Technology Review adds:
Flock Safety, whose drones were once reserved for police departments, is now offering them for private-sector security, the company announced today, with potential customers including businesses intent on curbing shoplifting.
Companies in the US can now place Flock’s drone docking stations on their premises. If the company has a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly beyond visual line of sight (these are becoming easier to get), its security team can fly the drones within a certain radius, often a few miles…
Kauffman walked through how the drone program might work in the case of retail theft: If the security team at a store like Home Depot, for example, saw shoplifters leave the store, then the drone, equipped with cameras, could be activated from its docking station on the roof.
‘The drone follows the people. The people get in a car. You click a button,’ he says, ‘and you track the vehicle with the drone, and the drone just follows the car.’
The video feed of that drone might go to the company’s security team, but it could also be automatically transmitted directly to police departments.
A month ago, only one private-sector firm was a customer — Morning Star, a California tomato processing company that uses drones to protect its facilities against theft. It does not have many customers in the private sector yet. Flock is currently in talks with large retailers to try to get them to purchase its drones. Flock is also pitching “the drones to hospital campuses, warehouse sites, and oil and gas facilities,” MIT Technology Review says.
Walmart recently expanded its use of drones to three more states (use of drones to deliver its products to customers, not to catch criminals).
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.
