The drones were ready for this moment
AERIAL COMPANIONS ARE TAKING OVER ANY NUMBER OF HUMAN TASKS AS PEOPLE HUNKER INDOORS
New Yorkers strolling along the East River early last month glanced up to see an unsettling sight: a mysterious drone claiming to represent something called the “Anti-Covid-19 Volunteer Drone Task Force” barking orders to pedestrians below to maintain social distancing.
“Please maintain a social distance of at least 6 feet,” the drone intoned, according to a report from CBS News, continuing with gloomy warnings, like “please help stop the spread of this virus” and “reduce the death toll and help save lives.”
It wasn’t a police drone. Was it a vigilante drone or an aerial white knight? Was it friend or foe?
That’s a highly relevant question about drones in general, which are suddenly everywhere during the coronavirus crisis, taking over any number of human tasks as people hunker indoors.
Drones have been working as police officers, soaring over the banks of the Seine in Paris and the city squares of Mumbai, to patrol for social distancing violators. They’re delivering medical supplies in Rwanda and snacks in Virginia. They’re hovering over crowds China to scan for fevers below.
Coronavirus has been devastating to humans, but may well prove a decisive step toward a long-prophesied Drone Age, when aerial robots begin to shed their Orwellian image as tools of war and surveillance and become a common feature of daily life, serving as helpers and, perhaps soon, companions. “Robots are so often cast as the bad guys,” said Daniel H. Wilson, a former roboticist and the author of the 2011 science fiction novel “Robopocalypse.” “But what’s happening now is weirdly utopic, as opposed to dystopic. Robots are designed to solve problems that are dull, dirty and dangerous, and now we have a sudden global emergency in which the machines we’re used to fearing are uniquely well suited to swoop in and save the day.”
Eye in the sky
First, however, we’ll have to get past the fears of an actual robopocalypse, with robots of the sky rising up to take over while their wetware-enabled former masters huddle in fear below.
The origins of the “Anti-Covid-19 Volunteer Drone Task Force,” which turned out to be the work of a Queens drone enthusiast, may have confused New Yorkers initially, but in most cities, there is no question who is running the current aerial patrol. Law enforcement officials in cities and towns around the world have been using drones to scan parks, beaches and city squares for violators wandering into the safe spaces of others.
In China, drones have served as educators or enforcers, depending on your point of view, alerting citizens with unsettlingly folksy warnings about virus violations in robotic voices from above, as reported by CNN.
“Yes auntie, this is the drone speaking to you,” said one drone, speaking to an elderly woman below in an eerie bullhorn echo, according to a video published by Global Times, a state-controlled newspaper. “You shouldn’t walk about without wearing a mask.”
The idea of a government eye in the sky doesn’t always play so well in the United States, where personal liberty is a founding precept taken very seriously in many regions.
“Covid-19? More like Covid-1984,” read one recent Reddit post on a thread about police drones flying over encampments of homeless people in cities such as Fort
Worth, Texas and Chula Vista, California, blasting them with messages about coronavirus prevention. “It really feels like we are living in some dystopian science fiction novel,” read another.
Virus blasters
Drones have other uses besides snooping, of course. They have stepped [or soared] up as aerial virus blasters, with authorities in countries and cities around the world — China, Dubai, Indonesia, France, as well as the United States — using them to sanitise city streets.
Drones are also performing crucial roles on the medical front lines that may be described as humanitarian … if they were performed by humans.
“This is the moment when the drone industry gets to show what it can do,” said Miriam McNabb, the Editor of Dronelife, an industry news site, and the CEO of Job for Drones, an online drone services marketplace. “Things like drone delivery are life-saving applications that are changing people’s perceptions of drones.”
Zipline, a San Francisco-based start-up founded in 2014 that airdrops medical supplies and ferries tests from more than 1,000 hospitals in Ghana and Rwanda by drone, replacing the need for face-to-face contact. Zipline’s fixed-wing drones have already made 30,600 deliveries of medical products in those countries since the start of the pandemic, the company said.
Last month, Wing, a drone-delivery service owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, received the first Federal Aviation Administration approval for commercial package delivery, starting in Christiansburg, Virginia, a town of about 22,000, which is near Wing’s testing facility at nearby Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. (Wing is also operating in Helsinki, Finland, as well as Canberra and Logan in Australia.)
During the lockdown, drones have also shown their potential as investigative reporters, bringing to light heartwrenching stories like the mass graves for unclaimed bodies of Covid-19 victims on Hart Island in New York.
The footage was shot by a photographer, George Steinmetz, whose drone was confiscated by police for photographing the island without permission from the city’s Department of Correction. It was widely shared, illustrating the death toll beyond the statistics in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefing.
“Drones sell this idea of emptiness, this lack of life better than anything,” said Dexter Kennedy, 29, a drone photographer in Hoboken, New Jersey, who has been shooting aerial footage of abandoned streets in Philadelphia, as well as the empty boardwalks of Atlantic City and Jersey City during the lockdown.
Things like drone delivery are lifesaving applications that are changing people’s perceptions of drones.”
Miriam McNabb | Editor of Dronelife