[Peetwo]

Finally old mate Pinocchio has found semi-safe ground to which he can apply his spin & bullshit...   

Drones patrol for feral animals  

• by: Chris Griffith
  
• From: The Australian
  
• July 21, 2015 12:00AM
  

Senior Technology Journalist
Sydney




Marcus Ehrlich with one of the military-grade drones being trialled in rural Australia to detect invasive pests on farms. Source: Supplied
Drones operating day and night could be in line to patrol remote areas of Australia for feral animals in what could be the 21st century answer to a rabbit-proof fence.  

That’s the aim of Ninox Robotics, a Sydney-based start-up whose unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become the first commercial drones to conduct test flights scouring Australia’s bush at night using infra-red technology.

The drones can be flown remotely or programmed to fly themselves.

Ninox managing director Marcus Ehrlich said the company was in discussions to employ ex-military drone pilots who flew operations in Afghanistan.

“Many of them have thousands of hours of drone sorties in Afghanistan and a lot of them have come home and don’t have many places to use those skills,” he said.

Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) spokesman Peter Gibson confirmed that Ninox was the first commercial operator to be granted a licence to fly above 123m and at night during its trials.

The fixed-wing drones were put through their paces at Charleville and Moonie in southern Queensland and at Walcha in northern NSW. The UAVs were tasked with searching for wild dogs, pigs, foxes, goats, camels and rabbits, which Mr Ehrlich said cost Australian agriculture more than $1bn annually in lost production.

“Most feral animals are nocturnal and that’s the idea behind Ninox. There’s no hiding from our thermal camera,” he said.

Targeted species were identified by their heat signatures, with the UAVs beaming thermal video back to the pilots in a ground control station in real time. The 3m drones have a 1.5m fuselage, are powered by lithium batteries with a five-hour duration, and communicate by short-wave radio. Navigation during testing was done by locking on to up to seven GPS satellites at a time.

According to Mr Ehrlich, the UAVs had been cleared to fly up to a height of 490m. Capable of combing over 100sq km of land at up to 120km/h, the UAVs only flew 15km from their ground station during testing. With the drones flying above the tree canopy to avoid collisions, the tests involved both autonomous and manual control.

“The idea is that we fly over a certain area with the real time thermal imagery coming back, and if we spot a feral pig or dog we can take manual control and keep circling,” Mr Ehrlich said.

But monitoring wouldn’t turn into a Star Wars-like pursuit with the UAVs swooping down and attacking feral animals from the sky. Instead their real time locations would be given to farmers who could decide on follow-up action.

In future the drones might monitor infrastructure such as regional rail and pipelines, check dams for water levels, track fires using infra-red technology, and conduct other forms of biosecurity intelligence. They might also track people lost in national parks by their heat signatures. “The technology could tell farmers how well hydrated their crops were,” he said.

The first week of trials saw Ninox Robotics UAVs conduct a successful mock rescue of a person lost in the bush, search for small brush fires from over 5km away using thermal imaging, and catalogue a mob of sheep. The company was in talks with fire authorities, Mr Ehrlich said.

He said about 20 sorties were scheduled using visual and thermal-based cameras. Trials would continue until July 31.

Mr Ehrlich estimated that Ninox would charge farmers about $3500 for a four-hour sortie with a fully deployed team and for the information it gathered.

After that I started visualising drones skirting the perimeter of Bankstown airport or overflying Aviation House in the hunt for wascily wabbits, or wordly weasels, or donkey eared Pinocchio heads and then I ROFLMAO...

If only it was true...