In the posh seaside town of Santa Monica, California, when someone dials 911 for police, a drone is instantly launched from the station's roof.

Officers also respond. However, most of the time, the drone arrives first, flying directly to a set of GPS coordinates the controller entered. Sometimes, it arrives in less than 30 seconds.

“It’s a fundamental change in the way that we can bring policing services to our city,” said Peter Lashley, a veteran of the force who often pilots the drone from a screen-filled command center inside the police station.

The drone's robust camera can zoom in close enough to read a license plate or provide a view of several square blocks. The drone camera was the lone eyewitness to a horrific heist in Santa Monica, and one of the two culprits was caught and found guilty. It gave responding cops crucial information—that what appeared to be guns in victims' hands weren't firearms—on at least three occasions. Officers could respond far less forcefully thanks to that information.

Police believe drones could have a significant impact by diffusing potentially violent situations when law enforcement agencies are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy because of several high-profile murder cases involving cops. Their spread is also expected to ignite concerns about privacy hazards and a fresh discussion about the relationship between the public and their government.

The government is eager to stress out that drones are not used for surveillance but for incident response.
Drone use by the police has been experimented with for a while, although it is uncommon and relatively new. The first-responder program began in 2018 in Chula Vista, close to San Diego, where officials received a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly outside a pilot's line of sight. Drones may now cover the entire city. The initiative has swiftly spread throughout Los Angeles County over the past two years; besides Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Redondo Beach have also adopted it, along with about a dozen other departments nationally. The Los Angeles Police Department, which runs a fleet of helicopters, does not deploy drones for 911 calls, despite claims from department officials that they do so in tactical scenarios occasionally.

As technology advances, so does the usage of tactical drones. The Lemur, a reinforced quadcopter that can fly into buildings, break glass, push open doors, and allow authorities to speak to hostage-taking suspects who are blocked, was recently shown to reporters. Although Santa Monica hasn't yet adopted one, many other departments have.

The catastrophic shooting in his hometown of Las Vegas inspired Blake Resnick, then 17 years old, to start BRINC, which is the company that produces the Lemur.

“What we found in tactical situations is if we can communicate with a person, we can de-escalate it much quicker and bring the situation to resolution,” said Don Lemond, a retired Chula Vista police officer who now works for BRINC. “But we also deployed it during the Surfside condo collapse in Florida to look for people that were trapped inside the building.”

As a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, Jay Stanley has studied government drone use. He claims his group is not against using drones to respond to emergencies or rescue hostages.

"Our stance is that it's legitimate for police departments to use drones for raids, accidents, and crime scenes, as well as to find a lost child in the woods," he said.

However, he noted police drone use raises "all the same questions body cameras raise." What occurs to the video? Who is permitted access? Will the cops broadcast the video when it bolsters their image of heroism and bury it when it doesn't?
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“It’s an incredible resource that’s going to potentially reduce risk and liability and ultimately make policing safer for not only the community but also for the officer,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can see from the air,” Redondo Police Capt. Stephen Sprengel said.

At the end of May, Walmart announced an expansion of its drone-delivery service. By the end of the year, the retail giant plans to offer the service from 34 locations in six states. When the service started, it was only offered from a single store in Arkansas and with this expansion; they hope to reach up to 4 million households.

The service will operate between 8AM and 8PM and deliver packages weighing less than 10 pounds. The service will be operated by a company Walmart has invested in--DroneUp. There will be a charge of $3.99 for the delivery. The order is packed into a box and a DroneUp pilot flies the drone to the customer’s location, easing the box gently down on the front lawn with a claw-like device at the end of a sturdy cable.
This program expansion is forecasted to take hundreds of deliveries within a few months to more than a million drone deliveries a year. Walmart is clearly targeting the one or two items that are purchased with quick last-minute trips. The press release stated that the top-selling item at one of the early hubs is Hamburger Helper.

The Wall Street Journal reported that both UPS and FedEx are experimenting with drones but aren’t offering an actual service yet. Alphabet (Google’s parent) has its own drone service called Wing with limited offerings in Virginia and Texas. Wing is also operating in Australia and through the first quarter of 2022, they claim deliveries of over 200,000 parcels.
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And we can’t forget Amazon. As we wrote in Technology This Week Issue 8-49, the company is still experiencing problems with its drone efforts. The big difference for Amazon’s program is that they want the drones to be autonomous rather than piloted. Because of their commitment to “certified pilots,” Walmart will have a tougher time scaling up their efforts. Drone flights, by regulation, must be ‘line-of-sight’ flights. Stores will have to have control towers in their parking lots and are limited to a 1.5-mile radius for deliveries.
We will all keep our eyes on Walmart during the rest of 2022 to see if they will be successful in their new drone efforts. It could be a chance for Walmart to surpass Amazon in a critical technology area in the new retail arena!

In the near future, your phone may take its 5G signal from the sky instead of a nearby mast on the ground. It's an innovative way to solve the problem of increasing connectivity without relying on thousands of terrestrial cell towers. The concept is known as a High-Altitude Platform Station (HAPS), and it essentially takes the cell tower from the ground and puts it in the sky.

The latest HAPS project to be unveiled is from Great Britain – Stratospheric Platforms and Cambridge Consultants. Recently, the pair revealed the core of its efforts, a special antenna and crewless aircraft, which it has been working on confidentially for the last four years.

How will it work? Instead of talking to a nearby tower to get its signal, your phone talks to a three-square-meter antenna attached to hydrogen-powered aircraft with a 60-meter wingspan, flying at an altitude of 12 miles (20 kilometers). The aircraft, or HAP, is expected to stay aloft for at least a week, all the while providing 4G LTE and 5G network coverage over an area of about 86 miles (140 kilometers).

Phones don't give off a powerful signal, hence the antenna array's size on the aircraft, which has 4,000 radios working together inside it. The processing power is similarly immense, helping to steer and direct the beams toward the ground even when the aircraft is shifting around. The cooling system has to work at high altitudes, minimize drag, and keep the weight manageable. It's an exciting piece of technology in itself.

The aircraft itself, which is made of a composite material, has already been certified for use, so it's deemed safe and ready for flight in civil airspace. There's no pilot, and ground-based operators will only be involved during takeoff and landing. The hydrogen power cell is not only environmentally friendly, as it only produces water vapor and emits very little noise, but it also gives off a lot of power — it has been tested to 50KW in labs already — for a long duration. That's a lot more than the low-power solar power systems used on other HAP vehicles.

HAPS systems are also expected to be cheaper to implement. Building each aircraft reportedly saves 70% over the costs of building and installing a traditional mast. Then there's the space-saving and logistical benefits. According to research quoted by the team, it's estimated that an impractical sum of 400,000 5G masts will be needed to cover the U.K., for example, and each aircraft could replace around 200 of those masts.

What can you expect from the connection? The aircraft should return a smooth Sub-6 5G beamed signal offering speeds of 100Mbits per second and 1m/s latency to devices connected to it, which don't need any special software or hardware modifications. While a fleet of HAPS aircraft could provide enough coverage for an entire country, what's very interesting is that the unique modular design of the antenna enables targeted coverage.

This means a signal from a part of the antenna could be focused on an individual area like a motorway or even a single vehicle driving on it. The team said a fleet of 60 aircraft could cover the U.K. in its entirety, and the idea is for networks to partner with dedicated "airlines" that operate the planes.

Potential problems. This new technology forces networks to rethink how they currently work. Network operators are already installing a 5G network using traditional masts. Convincing them to bypass this and adopt a sky-bound service will take a lot of work. However, the team calls its stratospheric network complementary to a traditional terrestrial network and says the costs involved will be temptingly less than creating a widespread 5G network using only ground-based masts.
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When will it arrive? When can we expect to see Stratospheric Platforms HAPS system in operation? Deutsche Telekom is the project's initial investor and launch partner, and it has already tested an early version to show the system works. Stratospheric Platforms' aircraft is in preproduction now, with plans for the first prototype flight in 2022, while the antenna exists as a proof of concept and works with 3G, 4G, and 5G. It's anticipated the service will go live in 2024.

Last month, a team of MIT engineers launched Jungle Hawk Owl from the back of a compact car. It was the first flight for the 24-foot-wide drone, which the team believes is capable of staying in the air for five days on a single tank of gas. 
The craft was designed to address a challenge posed by the U.S. Air Force. The teams were asked to develop a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) powered by solar energy that was able to stay in the air for long periods. The idea was to design a vehicle that could help deliver communications to areas impacted by natural disasters or other emergencies. Weather balloons have traditionally been the choice, but they drift with the wind and often don’t stay in the air long enough to be effective.

Not long after they began to work on the problem, the team abandoned the solar option. According to team co-lead, Professor Warren Hoburg, current solar technologies would require a much larger drone with a much larger surface area for panels, coupled with a large, heavy battery. Solar also runs into issues during the winter months and at latitudes far from the equator because of shortened daylight hours.

The winning team’s final design was built out of lightweight materials like carbon fiber and Kevlar, weighing a total of 55 pounds empty and 150 pounds with payload and a tank full of gas. The parts can be easily dissembled, and shipped to affected areas and the payload is the perfect size for carrying a shoebox-sized communication device designed by MIT’s Lincoln Labs, which helped support the project. 

Currently, the school is working with the FAA for permission to keep the drone in the air for the full five days as it continues its testing over the summer.

The French postal service will soon start a new drone delivery program to carry parcels on a set nine-mile route, the agency announced, following approval from the French aviation regulatory authority.

It’s just an experiment for now, not a fully launched program, and will only operate once a week. But it is the first time a federal postal service will use drones to deliver on a regular route.

The DPDgroup, a subsidiary of the French national postal service, has been perfecting its drone delivery project since 2014 in the south of France, working in partnership with Atechsys, a French drone company. In September 2015, the drone delivery project demonstrated its aircraft could fly in complete autonomy carrying a package weighing over three pounds a distance of nearly nine miles.

The drone route stretches between Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Beaume and Pourrières in the Provence region of France in the southeast of the country. For now, its businesses are participating in the experiment, including a dozen tech companies that can now receive parcels by drone, according to a statement from DPDgroup.

Eventually, Le Groupe La Poste, the name of the French postal service, hopes to use drones to deliver parcels in hard to reach rural or mountainous regions, where last-mile delivery is difficult and expensive by ground vehicle.

The drones used in the French postal experiment can fly as far as 12 miles carrying a payload of about two pounds at a maximum speed of about 19 miles per hour and are equipped with a parachute to land safely in case of a disruption with the flight.
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The U.S. Postal Service has been looking into drones, too. In October, USPS released the results of a survey gauging how Americans feel about the idea of drones carrying parcels to American doorsteps, showing more Americans like the idea of drone delivery than dislike it.

According to Amazon, the cop of the future won’t just be a robot; it will be one that fits in the palm of your hand.

Recently, the retail giant was granted a patent for a miniature, voice-controlled “unmanned aerial vehicle assistant” to be used by everyone from officers making traffic stops to shoppers just trying to figure out where they parked their cars.

According to the patent, off-board processing could be used to significantly reduce the size of the assistants compared to today’s drones while substantially increasing their capabilities. In one scenario described by Amazon, a UAV assistant would launch from a dock on a police officer’s microphone to act as a mobile dash cam and miniature partner.

 “As shown in [the illustration above], during a routine traffic stop, for example, the officer can command the [drone] to ‘hover’ or ‘follow me,’” reads the patent. “In some examples, if a foot chase develops during a traffic stop, the officer can command the [drone] to follow the suspect so that he can attempt to cut the suspect off in the cruiser. Similarly, if there are two or more suspects, the officer can command the [drone] to follow one the suspects, while he gives chase to the other.”

While the patent’s diagrams focus on law enforcement applications, Amazon believes the assistant could be used “for many other purposes,” including clearing buildings for military forces and even helping people decide if it’s worth waiting in line.

“If a user is waiting in a long line to buy concert tickets, for example, the user may not be able to see over the crowd to see how many total people are in line,” reads the patent. “In this case, the user can just say ‘hover’ to the UAV and the UAV can take up a position at a predetermined distance above the user (e.g., 15 feet).”
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When Amazon began investing in drones, it aimed to make a world where flying robots delivered customers their books and USB cables. Now, it seems, the internet’s biggest retailer has set its sights even higher.