DRONE HUBS
FIGHTING DEFORESTATION GLOSSARY DESIGN COMPETITION
ACCORDING to the
Global Forest Resources
Assessment 2015, the global forest area was reduced by 129 million hectares (3.1 per cent) in the period 1990–2015, to just under 4 billion hectares.
Replanting trees by hand is slow and expensive. A small
UK company, called BioCarbon Engineering, claims that unmanned aerial vehicles are a great solution to speedeed up forestation efforts around the world.
The company’s CEO Lauren Fletcher, who spent 20 years as an engineer with NASA, says the only way to fight industrial-scale deforestation is with industrial-scale reforestation.
BioCarbon Engineering plans to plant 1 billion trees a year using its drone technology.
Operating at a height of 1-2 metres, a drone loaded with germinated seeds in pressurised air canisters can fire biodegradable pods into the ground at a rate of one per second, or about 100,000 a day. Sixty drone teams could easily reach its 1 billion trees a year goal.
The first targets are in South Africa and the Amazonian jungles, both of which have suffered from widespread forest eradication.
Learn more: www.biocarbonengineering.com AMAZON'S Prime Air is a delivery system designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The commerce giant has Prime Air development centres in multiple international locations including the United Kingdom, Austria, France and Israel.
A patent application for a multi-level fulfilment centre to accommodate the landing and take-off of UAVs has just been published online. Drawings on the patent reveal plans for structures nine storeys tall that could house, recharge and dispatch drones in densely populated areas.
See patent: bit.ly/2sKfJFU
See video of drone delivery trial: amzn.to/2af8Zcd Students throughout Queensland are invited to think creatively and design a drone. If you could design a drone to do anything; what wouldoul you design?
Would it fly,fl crawl, swim, run, or bounce?
What mmaterial is it made of?
What iis the problem that your drone would solve?
Upload a short 55 second pitch video;
Submit a description of their drone and the problems it solves; and
Submit their conceptual designs.
The only crcriteria is that your drone design addresses one of the science challenges that Queensland is currently facing. The link for the list is available on the competition site.
Group 1: Prep to Year 3 Group 3: Year 7 to Year 9 Competition closes: August 21
Group 2: Year 4 to Year 6 Group 4: Year 10 to Year 12
Details available online. queensland-design-a-drone-competition.thinkable.org