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Even in small numbers they would be great to patrol lesser used hiking trails once the battery is improved a bit. It’s not uncommon for a hiker, particularly a
by gamegoblin 5y ago
Even in small numbers they would be great to patrol lesser used hiking trails once the battery is improved a bit.
It’s not uncommon for a hiker, particularly an elderly one, to stumble and slide downhill off the trail and be unable to make it back up due to an injury.
Just last Fall my wife and I came across a man whose horse had stumbled during a stream crossing and had fallen down a hill. The man had a torn ACL and couldn’t get out.
Had we and some passing trail runners not found this man, he would have certainly died that night as he had no gear, was soaked wet, and it was going to be well below freezing.
Imagine if the parks service just had a robot dog to do a final patrol of the trail at sundown, maybe with some thermal cameras or something.
- dagw 5y agoHow would these work better than drones with thermal cameras.
- gamegoblin 5y agoIf there are drones that have the battery life to fly ~15km under the tree canopy without hitting any trees or branches, etc, they would also be a great option. I think the high end consumer drones have range in this ballpark (eg DJI Mavic 2 Pro can go 18km with no wind). I’m not sure how much tree avoidance would be a problem, I’ve seen some pretty cool demos of autonomous forest drones. My intuition is that the robot dogs would be slightly more robust since they can self-right if they stumble, whereas if a drone hits a small obstacle it can pretty easily come tumbling out of the air and get stuck on the ground. I think the dogs could also be made more weatherproof than drones. I bet drones would be a much better option for lightly forested areas or desert areas, though, where they can generally fly above any obstacles.
- dagw 5y agoThere is actually a fair bit of research going on into using machine learning and image recognition to try detect bodies under tree canopies using thermal imaging
- tomp 5y agoDoing drones out of visual line of sight is quite dangerous. Worst thing if a robot dog “crashes” is, you pick it up next morning to recharge it.