Uses For Drones

We often hear about the use of large drones by the military and others in the war on terror. Here are some of the ways drones are used by the civilian population.

Real Estate Sales

Originally used for high-end properties, drone video is becoming more and more popular with forward thinking agencies. Drones are used for commercial advertising and for residential MLS listings.

Sports Photography

Extreme sports photography and drone video has focused on skiing and base-jumping activities as well as other action-packed adventures.

Highway Monitoring

With roughly 4 million miles of highways crisscrossing the United States drones can be used for inspecting roads and bridges, surveying land with laser mapping and alerting officials to traffic jams and accidents.

Wildlife Research

Drones can be used to conduct aerial counts of an endangered species or monitor migrating herds which helps with conservation activities.

Atmospheric Research

Drones helped NASA better understand how water vapor and ozone interact above the tropics in their study of how changes in water vapor in the stratosphere can affect global climate.

Hunting

Drones with heat-sensing cameras find feral hogs at night that are destroying crops. The drones save time otherwise wasted wandering muddy fields in the dark. They can also be used to spot illegal hunting.

Disaster Relief

Drones have a wide range of applications for disaster relief, from entering radiation-filled "hot zones" where human access would be dangerous (after a nuclear accident, for example) to searching for survivors across a debris-filled landscape.

Environmental Compliance

Midnight dumping of toxic waste and other surreptitious activities are the bane of environmental law enforcement. But drones may prove to be a cost-effective solution to that problem.

Hurricane Hunting

Larger drones can charge into the heart of a storm, without risking human life and limb, to spy on storms as they evolve. The Global Hawk drones can stay aloft for 30 hours and fly 11,000 miles with their 116-foot wingspans. That lets them reach and stay in stormy areas that manned planes can't, performing valuable surveillance.

3-D Mapping

Small, lightweight drones may look like simple model airplanes, but they can survey landscapes with thousands of digital images that can be stitched together into 3-D maps.

Uses to date have been for Haitian relief efforts after Hurricane Sandy, by farmers seeking to manage far-flung crops and fields, by mining companies monitoring changes to open pit mines, and by festivals to monitor crowd size for security reasons.

Down on the Farm

The precision agriculture movement uses technology to monitor fields, increasing yields and saving money. Precision applications of pesticides, water, or fertilizers, which drones can help by identifying exactly where such resources are needed and delivering them there, is better for the environment and for a farmer's bottom line.

Drone cameras that spot where nitrogen levels are low or watch the growth of a specific field section can also help farmers. Drones with infrared light cameras can reveal plant health by reflecting how efficient photosynthesis is in various plants.

Search and Rescue

When Royal Canadian Mounted Police responded to a late-night rollover in a remote location, they found that the disoriented driver had wandered off. A ground search and an air ambulance helicopter with night-vision gear failed to find him.

But after a cell phone call from the injured victim gave a hint to his whereabouts, a drone with heat-sensing equipment, launched by the Mounties, found the victim before a potentially fatal night outdoors in subfreezing temperatures.

Credit: cbsnews.com and nationalgeographic.com