With its four-foot wingspan and whiny, battery-powered engine, the Tiriba — or Parakeet in Portuguese — resembles a do-it-yourself model airplane. Yet many experts believe that portable UAS like the Parakeet will refashion civilian life similar to the way militarized drones like the US-made Predator changed the face of modern warfare.
As he watches the UAS skid to a halt on a dirt landing strip after a five-minute flight, Adriano Kancelkis, the president of AGX Tecnologia, which manufactures the $35,000 device, predicts that legions of average people around the world will soon be operating drones.
“Drone technology will spread as the costs come down, just like cell phones or DVDs,” Kancelkis told GlobalPost. In the future, he said, even commercial air travel will involve UAVs.
Although the proliferation of UAS raises serious questions about privacy, safety, and potential threats from terrorists, the non-military drone revolution is well underway across the globe. Dozens of countries have authorized their use for border control, police surveillance, firefighting, search-and-rescue, environmental operations and, in some cases, commercial purposes.
Drones monitor illegal fishing off Libya, Japan and the Galapagos Islands and patrol oil and gas pipelines in Angola, Nigeria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Conservationists in Nepal plan to send UAVs into the skies to help save endangered tigers and rhinos from poachers. Archaeologists in Russia are using small unmanned systems with infrared cameras to construct a 3-D model of ancient burial mounds. Researchers in Costa Rica have launched UAVs into volcanic clouds to try to predict major eruptions.
In Japan, unmanned helicopters now do most of the crop dusting. National Geographic is using a micro-copter camera to produce a documentary on the African Serengeti. In Brazil, the Parakeet and a larger model called the Parrot are being used by farmers to spot crop blights and apply pesticides with more accuracy.
It goes farther. The US military is testing a pilotless freight helicopter which could be the first step towards worldwide commercial air-cargo deliveries by drone.
Peter W. Singer, an expert on robotics at the Brookings Institution in Washington and author of the book “Wired For War,” compared the proliferation of UAS to the way aircraft and computer technology spread during the last century.
“Both were used by the military and then moved to the civilian sector as they became cheaper and smaller and developed more functions,” Singer told GlobalPost. “You once had to be trained as a pilot to fly a drone, but now some of them can be operated with an IPhone app.”
Japan and other Asian nations are generally more comfortable with the idea of robots, which are sometimes cast in the region’s books and movies as science fiction heroes, Singer says. By contrast, Americans often view robots as part of a dystopian future in which cyborgs replace or undermine humans, as in the Hollywood blockbusters The Terminator and The Matrix.
Common criminals are already taking the new technology to the dark side. Last year, Singer said, a gang of thieves in Taiwan carried out a jewelry heist using remote-controlled helicopters.
“What the opening of the civilian airspace will do to robotics is akin to what the internet did to desktop computing,” Singer predicts. “If you are a maker of small tactical surveillance drones in the US right now, your client pool numbers effectively one: the US military. But when the airspace opens up, you will have as many as 21,000 new clients — all the state and local police agencies that either have expensive manned aviation departments or can’t afford them.”
Yet on all sides of the political spectrum, the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-fly UAVs is sowing fears of police fishing expeditions and the prospect that the United States could turn into a “surveillance society.”
Yet as US involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts winds down, the American UAV industry is looking for new ways to deploy unmanned aircraft at home and is closely watching developments overseas.
In Latin America, the nation that has done the most to open up its skies is Brazil. Not surprisingly, Brazil is now grappling with both the benefits and the Big Brother concerns brought on by drones.
In 2010, Brazil spent more than $350 million on 14 Israeli-made Heron UAVs for surveillance of the Amazon rainforest and border regions. In June, Bolivia’s top anti-drug official credited these UAVs for helping authorities detect 240 drug labs along the country’s frontier with Brazil.
Brazilian authorities were planning to use drones to monitor drug-dealing gangs in Rio de Janeiro’s violent slums ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics which will be held in Rio.
“We believe the UAS are going to help us save lives, despite the fact they could be downed by enemy fire from these criminal groups, some of which have heavy weapons and have even attacked our armor-plated helicopters,” Major Montenegro Magalhaes Neto, who heads the UAS programme at the Military Engineering Institute in Rio, told the MercoPress news agency in September.
However, in a December interview with GlobalPost, Major Magalhaes walked back his earlier statement. He said that new laws from Brazil’s version of the FAA prohibit drone flights over urban areas and that UAVs, at least for now, would not monitor the slums.
In Sao Carlos, located just north of Sao Paulo and the home of AGX Tecnologias, Adriano Kancelkis bubbles over with enthusiasm for what he sees as a potential “green revolution” by using drones for so-called precision farming.
Just as more and more US farmers are using self-steered, GPS-guided tractors with inch-level accuracy, he says Brazilian farmers are turning to UAS to cut costs and improve yields.
Like the United States, Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse and home to massive farms, some covering more than 100,000 acres. Instead of sending workers into the fields to spot infestations, flooding, or crooked corn rows, famers can buy or rent AGX’s Parrot and Parakeet drones that can immediately provide video and still photos to spot problems.
In his office, Kancelkis puts up color images on a computer screen and shows how they can be used to count orange trees and help growers estimate their output. The photos are far clearer than satellite images, which are sometimes obscured by cloud cover.
“In the future, I can’t imagine farming without drones,” Kancelkis says.
Next he puts up a photo showing how the course of a Brazilian river had been altered by illegal dredging for sand. The image was captured by an AGX drone used by the Environmental Police of Mato Grosso do Sul state and it helped officers track down the perpetrators, he said.
Still, Kancelkis is an odd mix of trendsetter, traditionalist, and worrywart.
Though fascinated by drones, he fears what could happen if the technology falls into the wrong hands. He is Brazil’s most high-profile advocate for commercializing unmanned aircraft, yet his office walls are decorated with photos of the Wright Brothers and Amelia Earhart. As for security at his own shop, one of the main lines of defense at the AGX drone factory is a growling guard dog.
Source: Alaska Despatch