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Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.
by majoe 2y ago
Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.
- wrp 2y agoFawns, as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors really a problem?
- olex 2y agoFawns as in "deer children". When young, they lie down in fields a lot, and don't have the flight instict developed yet, so if they're in the field with the "parent" deer out getting food and the tractors / harvesters come by, it can be legitimately dangerous.
- sshine 2y agoTheir instinct is to stay put, which means they don't run when the tractor comes. A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to reroute. This is probably the most "feel good" application of drones. That and detecting landmines.
- Muromec 2y agoThat’s exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are use most of the other time
- 867-5309 2y agothose fawns could be lying on a lot of oil
- infecto 2y agoIs it? I believe the commercial application for drones with thermal cameras is fairly well establish at this point. You can spot a lot of things in buildings, transmission lines, etc.
- baq 2y agoThe ops point is that after you spot them you call in old fashioned artillery.
- mschuster91 2y agoBesides deer protection and wildlife management in general, they're used in SAR and police - especially in mountainous or forest areas, it's just soooo much faster to send a quick-response team with thermal drones than to travel by foot or wait for a chopper to show up. Obviously in rough weather you still need a legit chopper, but for stuff like "find someone who didn't return from a hike/called for an emergency without knowing where he precisely is" they're just fine. On the infrastructure side, you can use thermal drones in construction planning to detect if/where a building is losing heat, spot (beginning) defects in industrial installations and inspect if a power line is still working acceptably. DJI also pairs the thermal camera with a decent photo camera so you don't need to send up two drones for the job.
- masklinn 2y ago> don't have the flight instict developed yet They specifically have the opposite instinct, because fawns usually lack coordination to flee like an adult. So they have the instinct to still.
- newsclues 2y agoThey hide in the field and are too afraid of running from a track or and farmers can’t see them.
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoA you imagine the aftermath of a deer getting ‘harvested’ by the combine? Can you imagine being I the cabin and witnessing that, how it probably sounds in the process? Then cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage?
- einarfd 2y agoI grew up on a farm in the nineties, and in my teens, I saw a roe deer fawn that went through a forage harvester. Surprisingly enough, there was almost no blood, but every bone in the animal was broken. The load of silage that it ended up in had to be thrown out, the forage harvester itself, needed some light repairs, the harvest got delayed a few hours, and the whole thing was really depressing. Luckily as far as I can remember it happened only once, and it was definitely something that we tried hard to avoid.
- nsvd 2y agoA female deer is called a doe.
- FranOntanaya 2y agoI assume they don't want wild animals that are ridden with diseases to end in something like cattle feed more than unavoidable.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoAlso, running over a fawn really bums out the person driving the tractor!
- olex 2y agoAnecdote on this: I've been flying R/C planes and drones in some publicly accessible fields with friends for years. Some farmers were a bit confrontational when they saw us (sometimes understandably so, we were always careful but the occasional crash and aircraft retrieval in the middle of a field _did_ happen...). But a few of them were interested, and asked if we could arrange to take some pictures and videos of the fields at specific times, to search for fawns before harvest or similar things. We were happy to oblige, and in return got access to even nicer, non-public areas to gather and fly from regularly. Win-win for all involved.
- defrost 2y agoThere's business in routine agricultural overflights for year to year comparison and records, with multispectral cameras (expensive) for ANOVA plots when cross breeding for new crops with resistance, for rock outcrop plotting | individual large rock recording for { later pickup | hazard enty into tractor maps } etc. A lot of that is done locally here ( large grain fields in Australia ).
- Vox_Leone 2y agoI am putting together a computer vision dataset for detection, identification, classification and counting for cattle herds of Indian breeds, which are the strength of Brazilian livestock farming [where there are still a lot of cattle in free-range pastures]. The dataset will also be useful for monitoring illegal livestock farming in protected areas, such as the Amazon. The scarcity of images of these types of cattle on the Internet, where European varieties are prevalent, forces me to negotiate with local farmers to fly my drones in order to obtain the images. It's not an easy job. Most are confrontational and hostile. I move forward with great difficulty but I will not give up. Soon at cownt.com.br. Edited for clarity.