Symposium date:
September 8-11, 2024 | Manchester

Drone News

Drones and COVID-19

Drones do not need to be quiet to fight COVID-19

Over the last 3 months the pandemic crisis has provided opportunities to demonstrate the strong potential of aerial mobility to help fighting COVID 19 in several forefront domains:

Surveillance

  • monitor public spaces such as parks, beaches, and city centers to control virus transmission
  • remotely ensure local compliance restrictions by enforcing lockdown measures including quarantines and curfews.
  • provide audio or flood lights or alert messages
  • enable verbal communication
  • shouting frightening commands at citizens venturing outdoors
  • posting drone footage on Twitter of citizens flouting the lockdown
  • detect people with infectious respiratory conditions by remotely monitoring temperature, heart and respiratory rates (under development)
  • detect individuals sneezing and coughing in crowds and other places where groups of people may work or congregate
  • reduce the risks in inspecting vital infrastructure.

Disinfection

  • spray disinfectant on outdoor targeted areas
  • disperse approved agents in large indoor spaces (sport or concert halls) or smaller areas (wagons)

Deliveries

  • transport critical supplies (medicines, test kits, blood samples, emergency aids …) to hospitals, test labs…
  • reduce unnecessary human contact between products and personnel
  • transport food and consumables to locked downed individuals
  • assist lock downed citizen in their daily duties (take pets for a walk) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxvgUBp4YPA

Of course, drones do not require to act silently in most of those applications.

They might even need to be as loud as possible when contributing to enforcing lock down… which means clever integration of loudspeakers in the drone frame and optimization of communication between the drone pilots and the public.

This new “speaking capacity” of drones will be added to “their listening capacity” which will be addressed during the QD Symposium in the specific session “Drone Audition” (7 papers to be presented). We have thus decided to supplement our agenda to include a “Drone Sound Emission / Speaking Drones session in our programme and await new abstracts on the topic.

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