Could “Pandemic Drones” Help Slow Coronavirus? Probably Not. But Covid-19 Is A Boom For Business

The name probably killed it before it even got off the ground.

On April 22nd, the Westport, CT Police Department announced that it had commenced testing five days earlier on “pandemic drones” to enforce social distancing as well as monitor the spread of the coronavirus through the tony suburb north of Manhattan.

Within hours, the Connecticut ACLU pounced, citing secrecy and surveillance concerns posed by “privacy-invading companies using COVID-19 as a chance to market their products and create future business opportunities.”

The company that sold Westport on its “Flatten The Curve Pilot Project”, Canadian-based Draganfly, claims its pandemic drones can monitor people’s temperatures from up to 190’ away through infrared thermography, as well as detect sneezing, coughing, heart and breathing rates, and “infectious conditions”.

Compared with putting officers at risk to enforce stay-at-home orders, Draganfly’s proposition undoubtedly sounded attractive. But Westport knew the blowback was inevitable. In its original Facebook post announcing the program, the Police Department stressed that the drones wouldn’t monitor residents’ private yards or employ facial recognition technology, and that all of the data captured would be “anonymized”, while helping to protect vulnerable groups like seniors.

The program never had a chance. Westport officials had difficulty explaining how the drones would actually help to contain the virus, and Draganfly’s press release was packed with phrases like “specialized sensors” and “computer vision systems” guaranteed to make any Constitutional American leery.  

Twenty-four hours later, on April 23rd, Westport canned the program entirely. For the emergent drone industry, however, the fact that it got as far as it did was a hopeful sign that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) might actually be one step closer to mainstream.

As the coronavirus lockdown stretches on, remote technologies, virtual services, and business delivery systems that promote social distancing while sustaining some level of economic activity are experiencing an unsurprising boom.

Hourly Zoom calls and webinars are now ubiquitous (there’s now a trending hashtag for #zoomfatigue). Docusign’s stock is soaring. Virtual real estate closings are keeping the industry on life support. Eyewear and clothing brands are even offering virtual fittings through AI software that hijacks your computer’s camera. And almost every student in America—and their parents—are getting their first taste of remote learning.

It seems logical then to wonder why remote unmanned drones aren’t suddenly filling the sky— dropping essential food and supplies, delivering vital PPE to hospitals, expediting corona test kits to labs, and helping police maintain public safety without forcing them to come into contact with potentially infected people—like Westport attempted?

Amazon has been talking up Prime Air for years. The U.S. military has been flying precision counterterrorism strikes with unmanned aircraft for decades with pilots dropping bombs half a world away. For an international community that’s involuntarily self-isolating and forced to rely increasingly on technology instead of each other to get by, the opportunities for pilot-less UAVs to minimize person-to-person contact while maintaining life’s critical services would seem to be limitless in demand right now.

So why aren’t they?

It’s not as simple as Jeff Bezos or Hollywood would like you to think.

For most mainstream businesses and consumers, drones still fly on the technological fringe, somewhere between machine learning and advanced robotics. They also sketch a lot of people out who, somewhat reasonably, associate unmanned flying robots with tyrannical surveillance states and “HAL” from A Space Odyssey.

There are notable exceptions. Freight railroads like BNSF were one of the first businesses to deploy drones commercially to monitor track accidents that occurred miles from the nearest road. That was back after the Great Recession. Mining, oil, and utility companies jumped on board not long afterwards for the same reason: it’s far faster and less expensive to get a drone with a camera into the air to the middle of nowhere than a human in a helicopter, especially responding to an emergency. Compared with Bezos’ spectacular visions of Prime Air gliding between glassy high-rises in Seattle and New York City delivering Napa Valley Pinot Noir, it ended up being “dirt and crude” that pioneered much of the industry’s technological development in its infancy in the most unspectacular ways.

Due to Covid-19, however, the perception of drones, and more importantly, how they can be used effectively for the public good may be having a Renaissance. “Remote” in many aspects of life has become now economically synonymous with lifesaving. And it may be the new normal for a while.

The town of Christiansburg, nestled in a valley in the Shenandoah Mountains 20 miles southwest of Roanoke, has been on lockdown since March 30 when Virginia Governor Ralph Northam issued a state-wide stay-at-home order in response to a surge in coronavirus infections. There wasn’t much to shut down in the rural town of 22,000 in the first place. But the impacts on the small businesses up and down Main Street were immediate and painful.

At the Mockingbird Café & Bakery, however, orders are up 50% since the lockdown began. That’s entirely due to Google parent company Alphabet’s drone-based start-up, Wing, whose Virginia-based fleet of autonomous, lightweight delivery drones is located just outside of town.

Since last October, Wing has been offering local residents drone deliveries from the local Walgreens, as well as select FedEx packages, as part of a national FAA pilot program to test the commercial use of unmanned aircraft in controlled U.S. airspace. The FAA program has 9 other test locations around the country.

For the drone industry writ large, there’s a lot at stake in Christiansburg, including money. The low-altitude space race right now looks a lot like Tesla and SpaceX did a decade ago: America’s wealthiest companies, backed by its richest people, funding previously unimaginable technological advances in an absurdly period of short time, while cajoling government regulators along for the ride.

So far, Wing is winning. Last April the company became the first drone operator to be formally certified as an air carrier by the FAA, which gave it the right to proclaim itself the only authorized residential drone delivery service in America (sorry Bezos). Since its founding in 2012 in Google X’s Moonshot Factory, Wing has conducted more than 100,000+ flights across three continents, keeping it a safe distance ahead of its competitors.

Wing’s package fulfillment process looks like this.

Merchandise is stocked at the company’s facility outside of town, and orders are placed through Wing’s proprietary app—similar to an aerial Uber eats. Once a customer places their order, Wing’s fixed-wing drones typically leave the warehouse within 10 minutes, carrying a laminated paper box and cruising at an average of 65 mph 150’ above ground level. When Wing’s drone arrives at the customer’s location, it scans the terrain for obstructions, then descends to 23’ where it lowers the cargo box on a tether and releases it onto the ground at a pre-designated spot. Wing’s fastest delivery to date from warehouse to customer is 2 minutes and 47 seconds. Its furthest is 12 miles round trip.

Wing’s Christiansburg business has doubled since Virginia locked down. In just a few weeks, the company rapidly expanded items customers can order to support as many local businesses as possible as well as to restock residents’ quickly dwindling essential supplies, like toilet paper, diapers, toothpaste, pasta, milk, bread, baby food, and prescription medicines. Wing’s other test programs in Australia and Finland have seen a similar doubling in activity as a result of corona quarantine purchases.

“No one could have predicted coronavirus,” says Wing’s Director of Communications Alexa Dennett, “Or what the impacts on retail and delivery would be. But even we were surprised at the uptake of customers when ‘shelter-at-home’ came to Virginia. When people are homebound and need to limit human-to-human contact our drones enable people to maintain a sense of normalcy without needing to travel or interact with one another. This is great news for communities trying to practice good social distancing during the pandemic. In contrast, it’s much more difficult for human delivery drivers to keep their distance.”

During the last global crisis in 2008, former President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously remarked that, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”.

While many Americans heard tone-deafness in Emanuel’s comment as their homes foreclosed, it wasn’t entirely inaccurate in context. “What I mean by that,” Emanuel quickly clarified, “Is (crisis is) an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

For Wing and other ‘Drone-As-A-Service’ (DaaS) companies, Covid-19 has presented a rapid, unexpected case study in scaling up and out and, more importantly, how to re-align the public’s perception about what autonomous unmanned aircraft are capable of delivering to improve lives without compromising privacy or airspace safety.

“It’s really early days so it’s hard to know how coronavirus will shape Wing’s strategy moving forward,” says Dennett. “But ultimately we would love for many more households around the U.S. and the world to have access to our technology. Long-term drone delivery can translate into efficiency and savings after Covid-19 as well, including fewer trips to the store and a more efficient way for local businesses to reach customers.”

Wing isn’t the only DaaS business getting a lift from Covid-19.

Another of the FAA’s drone pilot programs in Raleigh, NC pairs Swiss-based aerial delivery company Matternet with the city’s largest hospital system, WakeMed, in partnership with UPS and the North Carolina Department of Transportation to accelerate lab sample deliveries across the healthcare company’s three hospitals and eight outpatient facilities.   

“The partners each have a very different role,” Dr. Stuart Ginn, medical director at WakeMed Innovations, said in a press release when the program was announced last March. “We see this as an opportunity to improve transport operations inside our system. And in healthcare, that translates directly into patient care.”

As part of WakeMed’s program, UPS effectively functions as the “airline” and “control tower”, including coordinating flight authorizations with the FAA. Matternet provides the drones, technology, and airspace software to fly test samples from WakeMed’s ambulatory outpatient facilities to a designated landing pad at the main hospital in Raleigh, where they are quickly routed to the pathology lab.  

At scale, WakeMed’s pilot program is potentially game-changing. In the new age of coronavirus, where rapid testing is currently the critical difference between keeping America’s economy shut down and cautiously opening it back up, WakeMed’s program and the data it yields could have transformative consequences for grappling with the world’s next pandemic by eliminating the need to transfer blood and swabs by courier cars and Quest Diagnostic vans, thereby avoiding traffic, reducing accidents, and getting results faster.

“In a flight path using a drone, the time period between the specimen being transferred from one of our outpatient operations back to our main laboratory at our Raleigh campus can be very, very predictable,” explained Rick Shrum, WakeMed’s vice president and chief strategy officer. That can translate into saving lives—and, in the future, flattening a curve.

“Drone ops” during a pandemic, however, aren’t simply applicable to groceries and medical testing. The downstream upsides are quickly emerging in other industries where social distancing and working remotely are critical to staying in business.   

On the afternoon of April 3 of this year, shortly after 3:00 pm, a bizarre sound descended over Philadelphia, a city of roughly 5 million people and the largest American metropolis east of the Mississippi. It was one of spring’s first warm, sunny days. Windows were open. Despite the city’s recent stay-at-home order, thousands of people were outside running, biking, or walking their dogs.

“It was the eeriest sound,” recalls Mo Rushdy. “Most of us had never heard it before.”

The sound was silence.

At 3:00 pm that afternoon, pursuant to Mayor Bill Kenney’s directive, all public and private construction within Philadelphia’s city limits ground to a halt. For the first time since the Great Recession, the city’s airwaves weren’t throbbing with jack hammers, nail guns, buzzing saws, screaming contractors, and dumpsters being loaded. 

For Rushdy, however, co-founder and CEO of one of the city’s fastest growing development firms, Philly’s new sound of silence was equally chilling. When construction shut down that afternoon, his company the Riverwards Group had three massive projects in full swing totaling 267 new apartment units and townhouses, collectively valued at more than $95 million.

“We were concerned,” Rushdy tells me. “We’re obviously still reeling from the potential financial impacts from our projects being shut down and not knowing when we can restart again. But we also have millions of dollars of materials exposed right now on our job sites, sitting unprotected from the elements and vandalism.”

Because of the city’s stay-at-home lockdown, The Riverwards Group, like several other Philadelphia developers, quickly turned to drones. The Group has already deployed drones for marketing their developments, and will be using them for roof surveys on their new projects after heavy rains to document where the rainwater pools for warranty purposes. But job site security was the last thing on their mind when their projects were humming.

“Most of our projects are in up and coming neighborhoods,” says Lawrence McKnight, Riverwards Group’s Managing Partner, “So there’s a temptation for things to ‘walk off the jobsite’, especially when the sites are sitting empty. All we have is a chain link fence to keep people out. Using drones to inspect our projects remotely right now at regular intervals in order to maintain an up-to-date inventory of the condition of our materials as well as document any damage to them will be essential to any potential insurance claims.”

Around the same time, a similar scene was unfolding on a job site in Durham, NC—not far from where WakeMed’s blood samples were shuttling back and forth from rooftop to rooftop in Matternet’s drones.

In late February of this year, Marcus Acheson, an architect and studio principal at Little Diversified Architectural Consulting’s (LiTTLE), hired a consulting company called Aerial Analytics to conduct a survey for his team’s proposal to win a two-tower development project in Raleigh. For commercial design projects in their earliest stages, this is pretty standard stuff: get the lay of the land, figure out what you have to work with, and squeeze as much possible value from the property for your client as possible.

This time, however, LiTTLE didn’t hire the old-school surveyors you see on the side of the road in orange vests staring through a tripod mounted laser scrupulously penciling notes on graph paper. Instead Acheson commissioned an aerial LiDar (light detection and ranging) survey that’s typically performed by a helicopter crew, but is now flown by a remote unmanned drone the size of seagull. For 99% of architectural firms, this is still the stuff of design science fiction. Acheson, however, knew the data could be the difference between winning the project or losing it.  

“Our client was keenly interested in how much of development’s towers would be visible from the local highway,” Acheson explains, “Since this would establish the brand and improve the project’s marketability. We could have done the survey the old-fashioned way with some assumptions about the tree canopy and other obstructions. But we knew the rooflines would be close, so an exact representation of the site topography was critical. We had used drones before to understand what views would look like from specific floors of a potential building. But in this case the drone survey was able to map out the exact trees on site down to every last leaf to convince the owner that he needed to build taller for the project to be seen from the expressway. Everyone was blown away.”

Three weeks after Acheson commissioned his LiDar survey, North Carolina locked down. The following day Acheson sent his studio teams packing to work from home, with tens of millions of dollars of projects still under construction and no way to monitor them. That got Acheson thinking about drones again.

“What if we could keep our projects monitored remotely, I thought to myself,” Acheson recalls. “What if I didn’t have to put my staff at risk going into the field? What if we didn’t have to find site surveyors who actually want to work on a given site and fly a drone from the parking lot instead? What if we could work with contractors to monitor construction remotely, reduce exposure, minimize risk, and save on travel expenses? All of a sudden over the past few weeks I started to rethink everything. What else was possible?”

Which is precisely where the potential of drones slams head on into a hot red brick wall emblazoned with one screaming word: Regulation.

Sebastian Babiarz likes analogies. The Director of Strategic Business Development for AirMap and Co-President of GUTMA, the Swiss-based NGO attempting to streamline global drone airspace traffic management, spends most of his days attempting to explain things to people they have a hard time understanding.

So it’s often easier to paint pictures. Really simple ones.

[Quote about the evolution on mobile phones paralleling drone adoption i.e., one step at a time]

For many people like Babiarz who live in the drone space, the industry’s technology paradigm often seems agonizingly inverted: so much potential, but so little progress. So what’s holding it back?

“Regulation,” Babiarz says bluntly, “It’s as simple as that. We won’t be able to fully reap the commercial and societal benefits of drones until they’re able to fly safely over people, beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS), and at night. Once that happens, advanced capabilities will enable complex drone operations and unlock the broader drone economy. But only if proper regulatory and airspace safety frameworks are in place. We’re getting there.”

“Getting there” is what Babiarz’s company, AirMap, and GUTMA work on every day. Within the industry that crux move is called UTM—unmanned traffic management.

“UTM is the global, industry-wide collaborative effort to create a framework for safely managing a high volume of complex drone operations in low-altitude airspace,” Babiarz explains. “UTM creates a digital twin of the physical airspace that allows us to unlock the benefits of the drone economy through high-scale drone flights in a managed 3D way. Think thousands of drone operations over your city, every day. UTM makes that possible. And it’s essential to enabling the drone ecosystem’s growth.”

For the rest of us who don’t speak drone aviation, UTM means keeping the trains running on time, safely, through data automation. In crowded airspace around major cities and airports, nothing is more essential to the industry’s business model at scale.

“UTM airspace automation delivers a real-time operational picture of low-altitude airspace where autonomous drones fly,” continues Babiarz. “It’s like digital air traffic control for drone situational awareness, airspace authorization, remote identification, flight tracking, and deconfliction. This kind of data and automation are key to unlocking the industry’s potential.”

Ultimately, says Babiarz, it all comes down to human safety—no matter good the data is.

He likes to draw another analogy here. Self-driving cars are already confined to existing transportation pathways (roads). There’s typically also a human who can take over the wheel. And if the car malfunctions or road conditions change unexpectedly, increasing the risk of an accident, the car can pull over and stop.

That same de-escalation process can’t happen midair with an unmanned drone. If GPS signals are lost and lower atmospheric winds suddenly increase while a drone is flying “BVLOS”, or Beyond-Visual-Line-of-Sight—meaning out of eye contact with the remote pilot—it’s the low altitude equivalent of losing communications with a spacecraft on the dark side of the moon.

“Safety is the critical X factor here,” Babiarz says. “In order to conduct BVLOS operations, which is what scaling the industry will be based on, drones need to maintain strong connections to data sources, be equipped with mitigation capabilities, and be capable of executing safety protocols. What will a drone do if it malfunctions over a crowd of people? How does it proceed? Where will it conduct an emergency landing? We need to answer those questions in order to safely enable BVLOS flights at scale.”

If a Babiarz X factor scenario were to happen over Manhattan’s Time Square, for instance, or London’s Financial District, or Singapore’s Changi Airport, the consequences could be disastrous—both for human life and the industry at large. Almost everyone in the commercial DaaS space chomping for more opportunity acknowledges that all it takes is one high-profile collision with a Boeing Dreamliner to set the industry back a decade.

“Airspace authorities around the globe are tasked with keeping the airspace safe. That’s their essential responsibility, and one that should never be compromised,” says Babiarz. “There’s no doubt that there are powerful drone use cases, especially right now, such as contactless food and medical supply delivery, that could benefit society during the pandemic. But we have to carefully consider how to enable large-scale drone operations that best serve society without compromising safety standards. It’s a balancing act that technology will ultimately solve. And it’s a matter of when, not if.”

Unmanned drones have other issues holding them back beyond perception and safety. But most of these are resolvable with far fewer global complications and regulatory issues.

Battery life, flight time, and payload capacities currently limit operational distances and what drones can carry. Experimentation with new design forms, like rotating wings and remote collision avoidance systems, also come with their own risks since technology can fail. The world’s largest drone manufacturer, DJI, is also Chinese, which, post Covid-19 might inevitably make consumers and businesses more suspicious than they already were about data privacy and supply chain uncertainties.

Sometimes it’s also just easier to order dog food through Chewy and have the driver leave a package at the door. Thousands of technological innovations solve problems that don’t exist yet, and adopting innovation for innovation’s sake doesn’t always make financial sense.

But many in the drone space see the current coronavirus pandemic as a unique opportunity for the industry to get a new look.

“We’re in a period right now where people and companies in the drone industry are highly motivated to sense opportunities. I think medical supply and food deliveries, in particular, present a powerful opportunity for our industry to rally around. We’re well on the way to integrating drones into our everyday lives, and Covid-19 will likely speed up that process. The pandemic presents an opportunity to galvanize drones for the public good.”

LiTTLE’s Acheson agrees.

“In architecture, I don’t think we’re far from drone robotics actually doing construction,” says Acheson, “Drones welding steel, directing concrete pours, painting facades, 3D printing large shells or spinning webs of large scale tensile fabric roofs. Forensic examination of building exteriors for repair or to monitor construction tolerances. It’s all on the table right now. We just have to make that future a reality.”

The rest of the industry clearly hopes that Babiarz and Acheson are right.

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