Canadian Drones Save Lives

While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may not be a big part of your life right now, one day they just might save it.

In May 2013, the Saskatchewan RCMP reported the first life saved by a UAV in Canada. A man driving in near-freezing temperatures wearing only a t-shirt had flipped his car off the road in a remote, wooded area.  The man managed to call 911 but did not know where he was so only the last recorded location on his cell phone’s GPS was used. The police had originally deployed a regular, manned helicopter equipped with night vision to try and find him, but they weren't able to during an initial sweep of the area.

The RCMP eventually deployed their Draganflyer X4-E5 UAV which was equipped with an infrared camera. The UAV soon picked up three heat signatures 200 meters from the last known GPS location, where fire department members found the driver curled next to a tree.  According to the RCMP’s website that without the UAV, searchers would not have been able to locate the driver until daylight meaning he would have frozen to death before he could have been reached.

UAV’s are still in their genesis when it comes to bringing life-saving supplies to remote areas. Germany’s logistics company DHL will begin daily flights with their quad-rotor "DHL Paketkopter 2.0" to bring a maximum load of 1.2 kilograms of medicine to the sparsely populated German island of ‘Juist,’ located just off the nation’s northern coast. Flying up to 65kmph with the flight expected to take as long as 30 minutes, this is the first time an unmanned aircraft has been authorized to deliver goods in Europe. With medication, other urgently needed goods will also be transported, at times when other modes of transport such as flights or ferries are not operating.

The UAV Goes to School

Three quarters of a decade ago, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) invested millions into creating ‘neuromorphic chips’ – a type of computer chip that is designed to be as close as possible to a human brain in function, size and power consumption– in short, a ‘brain chip.’ With the project titled ‘SyNAPSE’ – Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scale Electronics – the ‘brain chip’ sounds like something you would find inside the research labs of Cyberdyne.

One of these ‘brain chips’ was tested inside a tiny unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which measured six inches square, 1.5 inches high, and weighed only 93 grams, including the battery.

The ‘brain chip’ works by having networks of silicon ‘neurons’ that communicate through jolts of electricity.  In the experiment, the UAV flew between three different rooms, where the ‘brain chip’ absorbed data from the aircraft’s optical, infrared and ultrasound sensors. Incoming sensor data from the room’s walls and furniture was created in the networks of silicon neurons and the UAV began to understand its surroundings. This caused a separate pattern of electrical activity in the neurons that the chip had never experienced before.” The connected neurons had begun to change, mimicking a crude version of learning like in a real brain. The UAV became ‘self-aware’ and started learning on its own, albeit in a very basic way.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to fundamentally change our civilization in ways we could not imagine. As AI takes to the skies, the public debate on the ethics of artificial intelligence will only increase.