With its bright-yellow armored body, grippy tank-like treads, plow nose and water cannon, the Los Angeles Fire Department's latest piece of equipment looks more like a Star Wars sidekick than a firefighting assistant.
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![]() With its bright-yellow armored body, grippy tank-like treads, plow nose and water cannon, the Los Angeles Fire Department's latest piece of equipment looks more like a Star Wars sidekick than a firefighting assistant. No comment yet.
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![]() California's DMV today issued a permit to Nuro authorizing the company to test two driverless vehicles on surface streets.
![]() Drone-based mapping of the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash site.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Drone-based mapping has become standard issue for most advanced crime scene investigations and post-disaster assessments, particularly when time-sensitivity is an issue.
![]() One organization needs volunteers in California to fly their drones over the shore to take pictures.
![]() As El Nino hits California, drones are heading into the air -- documenting the impacts of the rainfall on California's coastline. With El Nino comes surge in storms, coastal flooding and erosion. And the pace of shoreline change is rapidly speeding, meaning that the sea level rise and storms could destroy natural habitats and our… |
![]() The West Coast of the US is ablaze, turning skies an eerie shade of orange. The Verge captured photos of the apocalyptic landscape in San Francisco via drone as wildfires raged nearby.
![]() The restriction is in effect until the end of the month to prevent aircraft from entering the airspace, a rare occurrence for crashes.
![]() Drones became a permanent part of the Los Angeles Police Department’s crimefighting arsenal on Tuesday, despite opposition from privacy advocates who fear the remote-controlled aircraft will be used to spy on people.
![]() ThisThe Aliso Canyon natural gas well blowout released more than 100,000 tons of the powerful greenhouse gas methane before the well was finally plugged Feb. 11, according to the first study of the event, to be published Feb. ...
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This was a perfect application for UAV sensing. The fact we had to do this with an airplane is crazy. While our airplane-based sensing tools are great and have lots of applicability, this is a perfect case for where short-haul, well-equipped UAV could have solved the need much more cost effectively and safely.
See these related stories:
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/meet-scientist-flying-methane-leak/
http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/14/world/gas-leak-0
http://abc7.com/news/porter-ranch-gas-leak-prompts-faa-flight-restriction/1119076/
and some context here:
http://www.npr.org/tags/459824651/southern-california-gas-company
http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2016/02/24/46666/beyond-aliso-canyon-la-s-other-gas-wells/
PIRatE Lab's curator insight,
February 27, 2016 8:10 AM
This is single storage well failure erased all the work we have done fro the past year in terms of CO2 emission reduction in the state of California. Crazy. A clear sign that we need to get our energy infrastructure together and another example of why natural gas isn't as clean and the proponents often articulate (hint: leaks are the norm with natural gas infrastructure, not the exception). |