3 ms·
It looks like a practical use-case for drones even if the dropping of suppressive poke-balls probably needs improvement. Rough numbers: 3 million acres of fore
by svnt 5y ago
It looks like a practical use-case for drones even if the dropping of suppressive poke-balls probably needs improvement.
Rough numbers:
3 million acres of forest in USA, one drone could ultimately cover 500 sq km (13 km radius)
6000ish drones call it 10k for redundancy
Even at 10k per drone including base station that’s roughly $100M in hardware to cover the entirety of US forestland.
PG&E is your first customer.
edit: Even if I’m low by an order of magnitude on costs, PG&E is your first customer:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cpuc-imposes-largest-ever-penalty-of-19b-on-pge-for-northern-california/577625/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cpuc-imposes-largest-ever-p...
- python999 5y agoMaybe they would just monitor the corridors along transmission lines. That would be a tiny fraction of the area.
- byw 5y agoHonestly $100M is not bad considering a single Boeing 737 costs the same amount. But realistically you'd want winged drones, otherwise you'd need a large number of bases (power hookups, maintenance, etc.).
- ted_dunning 5y agoYellowstone park alone is over 2 million acres. 3 million acres is a wild under-estimate. You are nearly TWO orders of magnitude off.
- realslimjd 5y agoThere are 750 million acres of forest in the US and each drone can cover 40 acres. That's 18,000,000 drones required.