drones for everything

Paul Wallich came up with an ingenious way to keep an eye on his eight-year-old son without having to walk him to the school bus stop during the harsh winter days in Burlington, Vermont, USA. The little boy had to travel 400 meters daily from his doorstep, crossing a hill on a tree-lined road and staying out of sight of his parent. So Wallich, a Yale-educated physicist, editor, and science journalist, decided to build himself a flying bumblebee so he wouldn't take his eyes off his son from the warmth of home.

The artifact is a tiny gyroplane that weighs no more than a kilo, with two crossed axes and four propellers. A “quadrocopter”. Your brain can be bought online, a kit with an accelerometer, an altimeter, a gyroscope, a GPS unit, and even a memory card slot. Wallich attached a smartphone to him whose camera allowed him to see on his computer screen what his bumblebee was seeing. "Building it and making it fly was the easiest part," wrote this physicist in the prestigious IEEE Spectrum magazine. The difficult thing, he admits, was getting the bumblebee to follow the kid from a safe distance. Wallich decided to incorporate a GPS beacon in the little boy's backpack. She programmed the jalopy to follow her without getting closer than fifteen feet.

The device has its limitations, Wallich himself admitted to NBC television: On windy days, its performance left something to be desired. And the landscape doesn't help either, with trees and unevenness, so the gyroplane was in danger of crashing into any branch. But it could be improved, with obstacle-avoidance sonar units and a longer-lasting battery that Wallich believes his flying robot will one day be able to follow his son to school. "Until then," he explains, "I'll just have to keep an eye on him the old-fashioned way, which is to say, in person."

Wallich tried out the device in the winter of 2012. But his quip caught the media, which spread the story with headlines like: A (somewhat obsessive) father builds a drone. or “bumblebee”) to watch over your child. "The truth is that I used it only for rehearsals," Wallich clarifies today via email. “I discovered many ways in which the device could be dangerous if used in real conditions.” Grant that there is an immediate future in which drones will be used to keep an eye on the little ones. But the possibility of them crashing "makes them still dangerous."

The fact that this physicist would build a flying robot by buying the necessary to make it intelligent in a store would have been unthinkable at the beginning of this century. A little over a decade ago, this journalist had the opportunity to visit the Pittsburgh Robotics Institute, in Pennsylvania, in order to carry out a report on the evolution of robots for the RTVE scientific series 2.Mil. Despite Pittsburgh being a global temple of robotic advances, the visit was disappointing.

On that visit we spoke with James Ryan Miller, an engineer who was developing a prototype of a small autonomous helicopter. We never saw it fly, but Miller explained that even though he couldn't demonstrate it to us, the helicopter was already a success. The device had a laser system to recognize the landscape and elaborate a three-dimensional map, it could take off and land and avoid obstacles on its own. In a genuine sense, it was completely autonomous. "We tell it to fly to a particular location to take pictures, and then it takes off, reaches that location, and returns by itself." When we asked Miller how he saw the future, he didn't hesitate: "Planes and helicopters will be flying under almost independent control."

Miller was then pointing in the right direction, but with nuances. Home drones like Wallich's don't need to build their own maps, but they seem pretty smart nonetheless. The American company 3DRobotics has a catalog of several models ready to fly right out of the box. IRIS, a "quadrocopter" with two axes and four propellers, is just a mouse click away and 626 euros. Although it is controlled by radio controls, it also meets Miller's requirements: it takes off and lands on its own, and flies automatically according to an established flight plan. Route planning is amazingly easy thanks to free software. On a real Google map, the launch point is decided with the cursor, the places to which the device has to go consecutively and the return to the place from where it took off. To make sure it won't crash, we check a box if we want the drone to stay at a safe height. And the price includes a camera with stabilizer for video and photos.

IRIS is actually a robot that flies. It always knows where it is thanks to a GPS unit, but it doesn't scan its surroundings with laser beams to create three-dimensional maps. Is that artificial intelligence? Maybe not. But this quadcopter is part of a much larger, broader and more complex family. We could consider it a descendant of some of its older brothers remote-controlled (also called UAVs or unmanned aerial vehicles) that have been killing thousands of people for six years in Yemen and Afghanistan.

The largest operational drone in flight is the Eitan, made in Israel, with a range of 20 continuous hours and up to 12 kilometers in height. It is the size of a Boeing 737, with wingspans of 26 meters. The American Predator and Reaper are somewhat smaller, but fly higher (15 kilometers) and longer (30 hours). And the Pentagon has developed a tiny drone, the Nano Hummingbird, whose wingspan is just over 16 centimeters. It weighs 19 grams –less than a conventional AA-type battery– and can fly at more than 17 km/h for eight minutes.

The skies crossed by autonomous vehicles will have to wait a little longer for Miller's dream to come true. "The word almost prohibited is precisely autonomous, since that would imply that they would have the intelligence to act alone," explains Francisco Muñoz, director of the Aeronautical Programs Department of the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA). Drones that fly in airspace, he says, are always subject to a rule that cannot be broken: "There must always be someone responsible."

INTA has a long tradition of building unmanned aerial vehicles, prepared for damage reconnaissance from the air or civil missions. Spanish drones such as the ALO (light observation aircraft), a 45-kilo light aircraft capable of flying for two hours; the SIVA (integrated air surveillance system), weighing 300 kilos, or the Milano – weighing one ton and having a wingspan of 12 meters, capable of flying at an altitude of 7,900 meters – place eyes and senses on the Spanish sky. They offer the possibility of supervising borders, the detection and monitoring of fires and environmental surveillance. Now it is possible to program a drone to travel a line of marine buoys and collect data on salinity, pollutants, temperature... The possibilities are widening. But always under human control.

Despite this, military drone research is translating into civilian uses with unexpected rapidity. The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that by the end of this decade there will be 30,000 drones flying through the skies in that country, operated by police, rescue teams, journalists, scientists, real estate agents and citizens (about 50,000 planes fly there every day). Drones have taken a step forward. And they have found in the air the means to free themselves from their bonds. They are much more agile and their intelligence does not stop growing. In a way, these robots are finding the freedom of movement that represents the "dream" of every intelligent machine. This is the opinion of Peter Singer, a robotics expert at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the book Cybersecurity and cyberwar (Oxford University Press, 2014). "Drones are growing and becoming more agile, thanks to technological advances."

Singer predicts they will change the world. Up to what point? In war, the US Air Force already trains more drone operators than pilots. Just imagine what hundreds of thousands of machines capable of staying in the air for days, months or years will do, some with wingspans as big as a football field, others as small as an insect. “The opening of civilian airspace will affect robotics in a way analogous to how the Internet changed computers,” Singer says in a Brookings Institution essay.

Predictions are always risky, but there are signs that such a revolution may be far-reaching. In the United States –the leading country in the development of this technology–, the aviation authorities have not opened the airspace to domestic drones for their commercial exploitation, although anyone can fly them at heights of no more than 120 meters and in areas that They are not close to airports. Manufacturers are pining for a regulation in 2015 to launch into a juicy market that, according to the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), could move $82 billion over the next 10 years. and up to 100,000 jobs.

In Spain, which wants to be one of the first European countries to legislate the use of unmanned aircraft, there is a legal vacuum regarding the flight of these devices by any citizen, as is the case with the classic controlled model airplanes by radio. "There is no civil regulation," warns Carles Aymat, president of the Technical Commission for Aeromodelling of the Royal Spanish Aeronautical Federation, with considerable concern. "Anyone can fly (the device) wherever they want." Sports model airplanes are regulated, he qualifies. A license must be obtained for authorized fields, located at least 500 meters from an urban area and at a greater distance from any airport. In other countries like France, flying any type of device is prohibited.

There is great interest in what happens in this regard in the United States. The electronic commerce giant Amazon has already unveiled a strategy to deliver its packages by drones, as soon as the regulation allows it, to save costs. And the critics have not been long in coming about the convenience or not of a system that can be an easy target for thieves – shooting down a drone with propellers to get hold of your package would not be a big problem in a country where millions of weapons circulate – or safety. Imagine any Cyber ​​Monday with swarms of drones bringing their deals to 10 neighbors living in the same building on the same day. The Incake company in Shanghai, China, which had first started using drones to deliver cakes to its customers on the outskirts of the city, had to ground its fleet of three aircraft on the orders of the Chinese authorities, as They considered this form of shipping unsafe and dangerous. The data suggests that for UAVs, accident rates are 353 times higher than those for commercial aviation.

For its part, the company 3DRobotics is conducting field trials with American farmers to adapt the use of larger quadcopters in agriculture, looking for ways to use fewer insecticides to reduce environmental damage. Instead of indiscriminately spraying insecticides from an airplane, drones, equipped with thermal cameras, could detect which plants need treatment and are diseased, since they give off less heat due to fungal infections. A la carte fumigation is being studied, something that has already been achieved by the team led by Francisca-López Granados, from the Sustainable Energy Institute, belonging to the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Their drone cameras, combined with sensors that pick up visible and infrared light, distinguish weeds from crop plants, both of which are very similar at first. The aircraft inspect and say when and where to spray.

Spanish scientists Juan José Negro, director of the Doñana Biological Station, also from the CSIC, and Mara Mulero Pazmany, a biologist on his team, are pioneers in using small drones in field work. During August 2012, they verified, in a series of tests, the effectiveness of the devices in the surveillance and detection of rhino poachers in South Africa. Poaching there has been on the rise. At the beginning of last year, hunters had been killing at a rate of two animals a day, these experts highlight in an article they published in the PLOS One magazine. The team carried out 20 demonstration flights in an area of ​​100,000 hectares located in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, a landscape of grassy fields dotted with patches of forest, home to approximately 500 black and white rhinos. The experts arrived with their equipment and deployed it in just two hours. “We had a ground station with two antennas and a range of about 10 kilometers, and we took off the drones by hand or from catapults,” says Negro. The devices did not reach two meters in wingspan, weighed two kilos and admitted a load of 350 grams.

Those Chinese-made drones rose between 10 and 260 meters. They carried on each flight either a photographic camera, a high-resolution video camera, or an infrared lens. They could be controlled from the ground, but they also executed the flights automatically and on a programmed basis. In the tests, extras were used with dogs that simulated the movements of poachers, who usually take these animals with them to hunt. The Spanish scientists verified that the flying devices could perfectly distinguish the figures of people and dogs "especially because of the shadows they projected." The flights lasted between 15 and 30 minutes, but the drones could detect the heat of the animals at night thanks to their thermal cameras. The bumblebees also discovered the gaps in the fences, the likely places of entry. Its GPS units made it possible to locate the geographic coordinates in each pixel of the image obtained. They didn't detect actual poachers that month, but they showed they could.

For Juan José Negro, from the Doñana Biological Station, these small devices extend the biologist's vision in an unthinkable way six years ago. Drones have finally allowed him to "see" through the kestrels thanks to implanting small GPS units – which barely weighed five grams – in these birds. When they returned to the nest, the researchers downloaded the drives' contents, plotted the flight paths, and programmed the drones. The scientists obtained some 4,460 high-resolution images from six different trips. They discovered that the birds used to go after the harvesters because they raised a large number of insects, a loot that could not be missed, among other aspects of the life of these raptors to help conserve this species.

But there is one last aspect that is bleak. The idea of ​​having thousands of eyes in the sky, with zoom lenses and sensors that see in the dark in astonishing detail, is not encouraging if you are the target. It is a future that Peter Singer, who has been forecasting this revolution, describes as "potentially threatening." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) produced a report in late 2011 stating that drones would pose a threat to citizen privacy if the FAA allowed their generalization.

The ACLU denounced a case of abuse by the New York police in 2004, which filmed a couple making love on the terrace of their house at night for four minutes using a night vision camera mounted on a helicopter. “This is the kind of abuse that could become widespread if drone technology came into common use,” reads the report by Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump.

The idea of ​​spying on your neighbor can become a dangerous temptation. These authors highlight that the generalization and abuse of drones could have longer-term effects, with unsuspected behavioral changes in the population. What would happen if every time you left home you felt the encouragement of the Government, the sensation of being watched by an eye from the air? Stanley and Crump conclude in their report: "Psychologists have found time and again that people who are being watched tend to behave differently and make different decisions than those who are not being watched." That is a kind of revolution that nobody wants.