Using drones and robots and AI to enforce property rights could be the defining conflict of the next decade, imo.
I've recently acquired a drone for security at the rural property I work/live at. A few evenings a week post-covid we get car loads of men from regional suburbs who use the countryside roads as their hangouts, drag strips, and subwoofer test ranges, or couples having sex in their cars. When a group of 4-6 men are hanging out at the edge of your property in front of your house at night with no police presence for about 20 miles, using a drone to make it clear they aren't alone or invisible usually gets them to go somewhere else and discourages them from coming back. Aftermarket LED/strobe lights enable later flights as well.
It's pretty dystopian, but really, the flights and video collect data for making a policy case for doing something about the issue in the township, and if the lurkers don't respect privacy and rural norms and police resources are too thin, this is a lot safer and less time consuming than rolling up on a group of strange men at night to tell them that treating our neighbourhoods as lawless is abusive and brings danger into the area.
This is to say the tension in that dynamic is only going to get more intense as the effect of policies of rapid change. The use case for drones and robots of various kinds will be to replace and intermediate what was previously an equillibrium of cultural norms. Today, GPT enabled android human-scarecrows are just a product launch away, where everyone gets their own mall cop. When there was mutual respect and understanding, we didn't need fences and barriers, but without that, technology like this rapidly becomes economical. Very strange times indeed.
> A few evenings a week post-covid we get ... couples having sex in their cars.
I don't live rurally but I would guess this isn't a very new concept. "Makeout point" has been around for a while. (not that it makes it any less annoying)
Given the invention and cheap availability of Airbnbs, these people who have sex in their cars or in public today are just fetishists. They've got alternatives that include private outdoor yards, but they're expressing a clear preference for public sex and appear to get off on abusing the attention and privacy of others. It's not just the outdoors, their kink requires a third party to be disgusted by them.
Maybe I should just lease a failing golf course in the area and charge nighttime admission as a makeout park.
I think this comment is pretty far off target. There is next to no available Airbnb in my area, and there's no way a spontaneous coupling would plan so far ahead. What's next, people renting Airbnb just to smoke some pot in?
I don't get it. What's wrong with pulling over and having sex in a car? If you don't want to watch... don't? What's disgusting about people having sex? Most people and species do that. The privacy aspect is pretty new too. Just weird puritanical stuff that's way more oppressive than teenagers in the woods.
Renting an AirBnb implies calculated intention, I would bet that a lot of the bouncing cars I've walked past in my years would be replaced by only one drunk with a single red cheek exiting the bar.
This is really out of touch. 99% of teens doing this don't have the disposable income to rent an Airbnb to have sex. And also bc each partner probably lives with their parents still (which btw is now common up to age 30). So in the car at night is by far the simplest solution.
Nobody walks in the USA, and vehicles often do significant damage to property.
Often, the point of driving the vehicle is effectively to do damage, recreational slides, drifts, spinning out, etc are all normal behaviors for off readers and the environmental damage done is often extreme and long lasting, while damage to animals, crops /trees, property, and roadways can often run into the tens of thousands of dollars for a group of “off road enthusiasts” frolicking for 20 minutes.
For the most part (with exceptions of course) the people (in the USA) that you end up dealing with that go on private property thinking they are “in the middle of nowhere” are doing so with no intention of being in any way responsible for their actions. The intention is often rather to “cut loose” aka engage in behaviors that would be considered too destructive, annoying, or illegal to do in a place where you might be held accountable for the consequences of your decisions.
IMHO this is an unhealthy memetic crystal common in US culture especially (but hardly exclusively) — the idea of costless externalization of costs and consequences.
It goes hand in hand with the tacit approval of theft when the amount involved is large enough. “Oceans Eleven” wouldn’t be nearly as cool if they were skillfully stealing televisions from suburban homes lol.
*Well of course people do, just as people hike in the USA. But in both cases it's something the vast majority of people don't do and that's totally fine.
I volunteered for a SAR team in the US southwest for 5 years, the last half of that or so we had an active drone unit.
Drones are good at covering terrain that's difficult to traverse on foot. Canyons, cliff walls, the like. As some of the rescues on the site show, they're also good for getting another angle that's not human-being eye level, which is sometimes all you need to spot a clue or subject.
Drones are not very good at covering large areas of ground quickly. It's also extremely difficult to spot anything small than an entire human being on the drone's camera. That means you miss valuable things like bootprints, pieces of equipment, etc.
They're a very useful tool in the toolbox, but I don't see them replacing human beings until image recognition technology gets another level-up. "Recognize a human being or signs of one with the background of literally any possible terrain on Earth" is a bit beyond what's field-deployable at the moment.
> It's also extremely difficult to spot anything small than an entire human being on the drone's camera. That
One of the articles mentioned a local fire dept had a drone with thermals which helped find a 14yr old boy lost in a remote area. That would certainly help. From the videos I’ve seen from Ukraine thermals are a huge advantage for finding people.
That may be true. My unit didn't have a thermal camera setup. However, we're not always looking for live subjects that will give off a thermal signature, and thermal cameras don't help with spotting inanimate objects. I would say we found signs of the subject's passage (equipment, footsteps) 80% of the time before finding the actual subject.
I worked with an imaging and aerial mission company in Colorado, and indeed thermal was used in the vast majority of search and rescue missions. Not useful for recovery, but for time sensitive operations it was critical.
> Drones are not very good at covering large areas of ground quickly.
I work with imaging drones in agriculture and every time we run the numbers the answer is almost always fixed wing. We have multirotors that have no problem flying at 80+km/h, but the battery life kills our ability to cover broad areas of land without having to land and swap batteries. With fixed-wing you get (depending on many factors) a ~10:1 efficiency improvement but also need significantly more skill as a pilot and potentially more infrastructure (e.g. a viable runway of some kind). VTOL fixed wings have some potential, but the takeoff and landing burns so much battery that you lose a lot of the advantages of the fixed wing.
I am developing CV systems for agribusiness and have been grappling with this issue. The solution seems to be a combination of the two systems. Quads are great for some tasks like herd detection/sorting/counting and spotting problems in planting. For crop dusting, seed planting, geo surveys in general you go with fixed wings.
Yeah, one of the approaches we're looking at involves using fixed wings to cover 98% of our surveys and "mopping up" the areas we can't hit with a quadrotor (e.g. near power lines, trees, other keepout zones)
There are some practicality points to it. For example, their system works awesome when you have a fixed base but might be impractical when launching with gear that's towable with half-ton truck.
How long before someone just gets as close as possible in a truck and deploys 100s of autonomous drones in a swarm to scan an area in detail and report anything significant?
I mean the technology for controlling drones like that is there, given these drone airshows. But it's a ton of data that needs to be processed, it may be a capacity and bandwidth issue / challenge as well.
Give it time, I'd say. Only a matter of time before there's drones autonomously mapping out big areas and computers assembling the data.
Was your drone a fixed wing or rotary wing? The battery life is always getting better, but I have to imagine the flight time on a fixed wing has got to just crush a quadcopter, although I think they're more difficult for a novice to fly.
>A man stuck in snow did not have a mobile phone signal to call for help. He typed an SMS into his phone, attached it to his drone and, once airborne, the phone found a signal, and help for him and two other stranded people arrived.
Top notch products, both hardware and software, at reasonable prices, very well tested and stable. That's why they steamrolled all competition, ie US gopro creator.
GoPro was very late to the game and isn't really an R&D company, they're a marketing company that gets others to design their cameras IIRC, so they had almost no chance of taking on a company like DJI that had a very strong R&D culture and a big head start.
I really like my DJI drone, it's almost too good to the point it's boring. But it's still easy to be concerned about the political issues with the company, and in some cases the company has overstepped it's boundaries a bit too far in terms of choosing safety. Their setup is basically setup for false positives where a false positive means you can't use the drone at all in a place where it is actually legal to fly if you follow the local laws.
"This Chinese company", meaning DJI? They're the world's biggest consumer drone manufacturer, and dominated the industry over the last decade and killed off all their American competitors because their hardware and software were really good, especially at their price point. These days you can find them at Costco, Best Buy, etc.
To me what's scary about this isn't that they're Chinese, but that American manufacturing had fallen so far behind that in a few short years a college student with some $100k in funding from a family friend, plus a bit of marketing, was able to create, defend, and expand a global drone empire while all our companies tried and died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI?wprov=sfla1
They seem to be one of the companies that believes you have to spend money to make money. Rather than trying to have some google translate type of service, they hired an actual professional marketing team using native speakers.
This is 0% different from ANY western capitalist company putting out a puffery "we donated an infinitesimal amount of our money or effort to a charity we arguably control anyway" piece. This is just a normal part of marketing and PR for western style companies. No need to try and attribute extra malice to this.
If you want to discuss the bad things about DJI, talk about their abhorrent privacy, or how they provided Russia with tools to locate and target Ukrainian DJI drone users.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely right. Can't speak to anywhere else but where I live, Apple's primary marketing campaign for the Apple Watch has been its ability to detect that the user is in peril and call emergency services. Strangely, I have yet to meet anyone who believes it's an American imperialist psy-op.
That's because DJI was founded in Shenzhen, a "Special Economic Zone" which "have province-level authority on economic administration." "SEZ's local congress and government have authority to legislate."[1]
In essence, it walks, talks, and acts like a Western company because it was founded in a part of China explicitly designed to encourage Western-style capitalism.
Is it just me (using Firefox) that has a map where Europe is shown as Asia, Latin America in the middle of the southern Atlantic, etc? There's some irony there, I guess!
There probably is, but it's military strategic information so not exactly available to civilians. That information may be revealed / declassified after the war though.
The main use of DJI drones in Ukraine is not to kill directly, but to collect intelligence that facilitates killing by enabling precise fire correction and target identification. Highly unlikely that this data has been aggregated or will ever be released.
I just woke up in the morning to the sadness of the new Elbit video[1] that make human life look like an RPG game, then this one made me a little bit happier
Neither the website nor the video represents the tools, they represent the wielders. I don't think the Chinese government (one of the most prominent DJI investors) is the most ethical organization in the world, but they at least try to pretend to be.
Uh, totally related, but can OpenCV do motion detection from a moving camera "out of the box"? If so, how? All the tutorial seems to be static camera motion detection.
It definitely cannot. Even doing static camera motion detection takes some work, and from my experience boils down to some kind of manual heuristics. OpenCV does provide a great set of "primitives", however.
For example, I like to compare snapshots to a rolling greyscale 3s average image and extract contours around large diffs. This still yields lots of noise (moving shadows are the worst!), but I don't need realtime answers and have a relatively fixed domain. This let me add models like CLIP to search out specific known false positives (and known good positives) to improve detection quality.
A moving camera, obviously has no fixed frame of reference to detect motion. As such, your heuristics need to change, and they'll get considerably more complex (and computationally expensive). Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely wouldn't even be based on OpenCV.
I really appreciate the answer. It seems like most tutorials do rely on simple heuristics like you mentioned, from the gimicky - like trying to filter out objects by dominant color, to the fairly complex like identifying contours.
How is there not a single marker in Ukraine? UAF are using every kind of equipment they manage, I have certainly seen in the media DJI drones being used there.
DJI are keen to distance themselves from the situation in Ukraine. Despite the enormous number of DJI drones being used in the conflict, DJI have officially prohibited the sale of their drones to Ukraine or Russia.
Likely due to reporting. It seems that news articles are used as the source. If the DJI marketing team maintaining this map is English, it's probably easier to find or verify English news stories. Most fire departments in Belgium now have a few drones as part of a pilot project, and I found a (Dutch) news article of an incident last month were they were used, even though the map is blank for Belgium.
I doubt _all_ rescues that involved drones are on this website. It clearly serves a promotional purpose and the builders of this platform might have more connections to people in the UK who to some degree participated in these rescues.
I can think of a few factors that might be relevant.
British police have been enthusiastic adopters of drones due to ongoing budget constraints. Drones are a lower-cost alternative to helicopters or large search teams.
British geography is well suited to small quadcopters. Helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft are much better suited to SAR operations in large unpopulated areas, but a quadcopter is often a better solution if you're searching a small area with dense terrain.
Britain has an exceptionally large number of CCTV cameras, which has created a base of knowledge and experience in using remotely-operated cameras as part of a search operation.
The Civil Aviation Authority has taken a relatively progressive approach to drone regulation. It's fairly easy to get licensed as a professional operator, and comparatively straightforward for those operators to get permission to fly in potentially high-risk scenarios (e.g. night flying over a densely populated area in controlled airspace).
Part of that could be that emergency services funding has been cut so much that the UK emergency services have to replace people with tech wherever possible, and sometimes where not so possible too. If you can't get 20 people together for a search then 1 drone is the next best alternative.
I think it's more likely that SAR is almost exclusively charity-funded in the UK and so the teams are more likely to promote the individual rescues are part of fund-raising.
It's not a new phenomenon, either. The RNLI has operated without government funding for 199 years.
there are many different types of "drones". just because the technique is used for warfare doesn't mean they're not also valuable tools for non-violent/sinister uses. bringing warfare drones into this discussion is a bit like saying: "but there are also knives for killing people!" while discussing dining cutlery.
it might be more like saying "but look how many people guns have saved!" - a transparent attempt to shift the narrative away from the harm in the first place
You can talk about literally anything that way, as long as you've already made up your mind. Here watch:
Everyone's always talking about the benefits of seatbelts, but it's just a distraction by big seatbelt to deflect from the harm seatbelts cause. All these "statistics" and "studies" about people surviving maybe because they were restrained are just to cover up the fact that some people are burned alive in crashes because they can't get out of these aforementioned restraints! Any discussion of the benefits of seatbelts exists only to spit on their graves.
I mean, you're the one talking about things that way, but it's only true if you ignore reality:
in reality, people AREN'T all talking about the benefits or costs of seatbelts, because there's been virtually universal agreement on both as of decades ago
in reality, people ARE talking about the harms of drones and guns, and dismissing such harms by deflecting to unrelated benefits rather than directly addressing the harms seems disingenuous, and not a balanced discussion, much less one around what people are actually discussing: the harms
there could be a million benefits of something, but none of them presented is a direct addressing of any given harm of that thing
Comparing small camera drones to large armed military UAVs is like comparing ambulances to tanks.
(Although the more interesting/worrying case is the recent use of weaponized hobby-grade quadcopters in the Ukraine war, a tactic that could potentially be used by terrorists outside of warzones)
This is a very nice advertisement, but a map that shows the privacy violations that the drones have been involved in would be interesting to compare. I love flying my quads, but implying that they are more useful for SAR than for stalking and peeping is disingenuous.
I don't see how drones are that useful for stalking and peeping. Do you know of any cases? They are super loud and obvious. Plus, the normal commercial ones are mostly useful for wide shots and only have a little bit of digital zoom.
In the EU countries, they are heavily regulated. You can't even fly them over your own property without registering them first and forget about flying over other people's property. Think you can just hide in the bushes? DJI is selling special equipment to airport security and law enforcement to track and identify their drones.
Drones used in war or for terrorism/espionage might be a different topic. That is definitely a problem.
> When Tina Turner got married at her estate in Switzerland over the weekend, she wanted to keep paparazzi away. But photographers used drones and other aircraft to get the exclusives they needed. The battle for pictures is increasingly moving into the airspace.
The Mini 2 is small enough not to require registration, and has optical zoom (2x only, but still)
It's powerful enough and inconspicuous enough to be a pest, no doubt. In my jurisdiction at least, using any size drone for "peeping" (violating someone's privacy in general) is illegal.
With the newest regulations, sub 250g drones like the Mini 2 DO NEED to be registered as well. Any drone containing a camera/microphone and not being classified as a "toy" needs to be, yes even when they are under 250g.
At least in Germany. Should be true for the whole EU, though some countries might implement the laws a little bit differently.
And, no, the mini 2 does not have optical zoom. Don't know where you got that information.
I've recently acquired a drone for security at the rural property I work/live at. A few evenings a week post-covid we get car loads of men from regional suburbs who use the countryside roads as their hangouts, drag strips, and subwoofer test ranges, or couples having sex in their cars. When a group of 4-6 men are hanging out at the edge of your property in front of your house at night with no police presence for about 20 miles, using a drone to make it clear they aren't alone or invisible usually gets them to go somewhere else and discourages them from coming back. Aftermarket LED/strobe lights enable later flights as well.
It's pretty dystopian, but really, the flights and video collect data for making a policy case for doing something about the issue in the township, and if the lurkers don't respect privacy and rural norms and police resources are too thin, this is a lot safer and less time consuming than rolling up on a group of strange men at night to tell them that treating our neighbourhoods as lawless is abusive and brings danger into the area.
This is to say the tension in that dynamic is only going to get more intense as the effect of policies of rapid change. The use case for drones and robots of various kinds will be to replace and intermediate what was previously an equillibrium of cultural norms. Today, GPT enabled android human-scarecrows are just a product launch away, where everyone gets their own mall cop. When there was mutual respect and understanding, we didn't need fences and barriers, but without that, technology like this rapidly becomes economical. Very strange times indeed.