Wondering what was going to cause this idea to take off and from watching this first youtube video made by Robert Scoble with the new DJI Phantom Vision 2 Drone (that retails at just $1000 and can be carried in a small holdall) it turns out it might be something that does actually ‘take off’.
It really can’t be long before all major motorway incidents are video recorded using such low cost easy to use technology because for one thing the insurance companies would see the cost of making it available to major incident teams as negligible (eg. more money will be spent on the cones that they are having placed on the road).
As soon as that’s happening it’s only going to be logical to send the recording to the emergency services response team (so they can better assess the response requirements) and then I think it’s going to be all too obvious that with plain old voice calls that the public are using we’re ignoring huge opportunities for getting insights and collecting evidence in emergency situations.
*** UPDATE 8 July 2014 ***
Check out this BBC profile of the AirDog auto follow drone and imagine the possibilities that having your own airborne video camera would afford emergency service personnel attending incidents:
And for dangerous environments and/or Search and Rescue how about an insect like crash happy drone that can actually guide itself…
*** UPDATE 24 July 2014 ***
The BBC is reporting that a drone belonging to a concerned volunteer located within 20 minutes an elderly Alzheimer’s Patient who had gone missing 3 days before. Incredibly a Wisconsin search team had been using dogs, helicopters and volunteers to comb the countryside until drone enthusiast David Lesh who had been visiting the area joined the community wide search effort.
