Tag: drones

Survey Drones Collect Seismic Data, Save Environment

In the surveying world, seismic data can reveal a plethora of valuable information. For example, the oil and gas industry heavily relies on seismic data to determine where the good stuff is buried. Seismic data in remote areas is sometimes difficult to collect. As this patent application observes, “if seismic equipment has to be deployed via a land vehicle, roads may be employed. If there are no roads, creating them can be time consuming and […]

In-Flight Sandbox for Foreign Software

It should come as no surprise that there will be an app store for drones soon. Third-party software may bring new and unexpected uses for the Inspire1 or the Solo. An unforeseen software glitch can be an issue. “An example issue is that a UAV can receive data or instructions from an unreliable program executing on the UAV. The unreliable program can provide erroneous data that can cause the UAV to be lost, damaged, or […]

Privacy-centric Image Processing Obscures the Innocent

With more drone surveillance comes more privacy issues. This patent application tries to mitigate the deleterious consequences to balance out the benefits and convenience of this new technology. Just like Google Maps fuzzes out faces and license plates, this invention aims to block out irrelevant data from surveillance footage taken not only by drones, but by CCTV cameras and manned aircraft. This may be more of a PR patent than anything else, since it’s hard […]