With the increasing use of autonomous machinery in our day-to-day lives, the influence of drone technology across verticals is extraordinary. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are turning out to be game changers in multiple sectors with special contribution to defense and commercial sector. Drones are being progressively employed to execute jobs of intelligence, surveillance as well as reconnaissance, and there is an increasing number of consumer market endeavors including retail, entertainment, agriculture, and healthcare too.

Their applications are prominent for real-time monitoring, wireless coverage provision, remote sensing, delivery of goods, precision in agriculture and security assurance, and the most recent use of drones in managing on ground situation for Covid-19.However, one of the major applications of drones or UAVs is to prevent birds from causing damage toassets present in the aerial territory.

Drones & the Protection of Aerial Territory

For any nation, aerial territory holds equal importance as land territory and so does its protection. When dealing with million-dollar assets, the protection of these assets is of utmost importance. The manufacturers of the UAVs have often dealt with their customers’ fear which is not a foreign threat but a local, natural one. Birds often fly into the line of assets, putting their lives at risk as well as causing damage to the assets.

In order to avoid the risk of collision with birds, deterrence techniques have concentrated on various methods to prevent birds from active airspace. In recent years, there have been some interesting developments in using drones both to attract birds, and to scare them away. They are also used to scare birds and animals away from the crops so that agriculture could be protected.

Functionally, the drone should have an inflight time of up to 60 minutes, reach an altitude of 1 kilometer, and have a range of 10 kilometers. The structure of the drone should be light weight so that the intensity of a potential collision would be minimal.

Range of Drones and Technologies Used

Some of the drone products used for the aerial territory protection include:

Surveillance Drones: These drones are fitted with high resolution camera which can fly in both day and night conditions. It transmits uninterrupted high resolution ‘live’ video feed and generates GPS coordinates of the locations.

High Altitude Drones: These are long range drones which will fly in hilly terrain.

High Endurance Drones: These drones can be developed with varied endurance and can go up to an endurance parameter of 5 hrs.

The cutting-edge technology services used in the area of drone design, that can support any drone manufacturer are:

System Design:

• Complete Drone development including electronics, mechanical, etc
• Connectivity and Camera integrations.
• Location based services, video streaming, etc
• Board bring-up and BSP.

Customer Engineering:

• Form-factor, customer L1/L2 support and customer use-cases development.
• Integrating various third-party cloud services, algorithms, etc.
• End-end system enablement.
  
  
  
  The technology of UAVs may not be immensely used at this point; however, its importance cannot be undermined to protect the aerial as well as land territory. Since we have technologies to protect and benefit the lives, manufacturers and product designers should aim build on existing technologies.

Detroit Engineered Products (DEP), an engineering solutions and product development company, has been working to design drones that are operative even for the most complex situations with better productivity, cost efficiency and flexibility.