Comment by hiddencost
6 months ago
Free business ideas, because I want this to exist:
Use drones with IR cameras:
* Find deer after they're shot. Right now you need to hire a blood hound and it takes hours
* Do wildlife surveys for conservation and management departments
* Pest management for farmers
Suprisingly your first idea is illegal in some states. For example it is illegal in Texas.
https://www.skysenderos.com/blogs/thermal-drone-deer-recover...
It'd be impossible to limit the use of drones to just recovery, some people would use them for tracking down the animals which is a horrible idea to allow.
Actually that is quite common in Germany, just for the completely opposite purpose - farmers use Mavic 2/3 Thermal drones to scout out for baby deer prior to letting a corn or grain harvester raze a field... because turns out, baby deer just freeze up when they are afraid of the machines and end up getting chopped up by the blades.
> * Find deer after they're shot. Right now you need to hire a blood hound and it takes hours
They tried this exact thing with the kentucky freeway shooter using both helicopter based FLIR system and IR camera equipped drones and failed. Eventually the dudes body was found by a group of ... as far as i can tell, wilderness youtubers working with a police search party.
Even the dogs didn't find him.
Launch from car while stuck in some random traffic jam: learn the cause of the jam and how long it is.
A good idea unless it becomes popular.
I'm picturing bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway with a cloud of drones overhead. Each person in their individual car using their individual drone to all report back the same thing: that everything is moving slowly because there are just too many cars on the road right now. With luck, the drones only crash into each other every once in a while, just like the cars below.
Just get cb radio
please, there are children in my car!
There was a recent story about a medivac helicopter not being able to land to help accident victims because someone had parked their drone over the wreck to check it out/get clicks.
Mobile maps apps already do this pretty well.
Launch while parking with an unfamiliar trailer or in an unfamiliar area.
This may not be legal, per the FAA.
I've worked on 2 (and also for SAR). Not many people working in that field still and there's very little open data.
Thermal is really good in the UK because the ground is rarely that warm. You can easily see a person hiding among rocks, for example. It's basically Cops. In equatorial Africa you can only use it at dawn/dusk (or overnight) because the ground is so hot.
If you google “thermal drone for hunting” you will find some YouTube videos about people solving the first problem.
Pest management is a heck of a good idea. The province of Alberta is officially rat free - if Alberta doesn’t have something like this I bet they would be interested. Especially if it could do double duty for wildlife surveys.
Stick a .22 on a drone with a thermal camera for pest management and that will be one of the most "American Dynamism" startups ever built.
The problem is that night-vision-y technologies are heavily controlled and price inflated. Only few are willing to buy QCIF 30Hz cameras at $500 from AliExpress or from legitimate resellers at $2k.