Drones have been primarily used for military and recreational purposes alike, but some people have stepped that game up to use drones for purposes that may be more unusual to others.
Now that drones are quickly gaining ground where popularity and awesome developments are concerned, there are more uses for them than simply just flying around and taking pictures and videos. And today we’re going to show you some of the most unusual ones.
#1: Delivering Food Straight to Your Front Door
If you’ve never heard of the German company DonerCopter, then you’re going to love finding out what they do. They are a startup who delivers Kebab straight to your front door using the power of drones, which can fly as fast as 65 mph.
Domino’s Pizza is also jumping on the drone wagon, and are currently testing their remote-controlled drone to carry two large pizzas. They’re trying to use a drone to make deliveries within a 4-mile radius in as little as 10 minutes per delivery.
#2: Making Amazon Deliveries
Where delivering packages using drones is concerned, Amazon is currently in the midst of doing just that. They are going to be switching to using a new service, Amazon Prime Air, for Prime users, which delivers smaller packages ordered off of Amazon straight to your door.
What’s more, this will be done in a single day! No more waiting days, even weeks, for a package to hit your door. There is even talk of a swarm of Amazon drones being used for larger orders, with the smaller drones breaking off from the swarm to drop off their packages and then get back into the group effort.
#3: Aiding in the Industry of Journalism
Gone are the days where drones were made to follow you around for the purpose of fun. Now, drones are being used in certain industries, including journalism, to aid in their stories that are released to the public every day.
Columbia’s University of Missouri is now taking a course to learn how to fly drones. This course was created as a tool for gathering information for the stories that journalists need. They are currently learning how to fly them, how to use the many devices and features that work the photography and video features, for example, and how drones can help with investigative reporting.
Overall, this is a great idea, and a lot of people are expecting that, because of the high popularity growth where drones are concerned, the demand for a course like this one can only go up from here.
#4: Monitoring the Highway
Certain news channels and radio broadcasting stations have a helicopter for their highway monitoring broadcasts, but that may just become a thing of the past soon enough.
An ongoing project that is studying how to use drones to inspect roads, watch bridges, survey the land, and map and alert officials to accidents, traffic jams, etc have managed to receive a grant.
The Georgia Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration granted the ongoing project $75,000 for the purpose of monitoring the highways for jams, accidents, and all of the above. The director of the CONECTech Lab located at the Georgia Institute of Technology had the following to say on the matter:
“Drones could very well keep construction and other workers on the roads and highways much safer. They won’t be headed into traffic, hanging off of a bridge, or anything that could be harmful to their well-being. In fact, this could help with the physical limitations that humans face when they are trying to do this type of work, so it’ll go a long way.”
In the United States, there are approximately 5 million miles of roads and highways. It’s impossible for them all to be watched using the human eye at all times of the day, not to mention very impractical. Therefore, bring in drones.
#5: Researching Further Into Our Atmosphere
It can be extremely difficult for the human race to constantly have a watchful eye on the condition of our planet’s atmosphere. Constant supervision on the ozone located in the Earth’s upper atmosphere keeps us safe through the protection of the surface of the Earth from harmful ultraviolet, or UV, radiation.
It’s crucial that we better understand just how our ozone and water vapor interact, but this can’t exactly be done by humans around the clock. As a solution, however, NASA is going to be sending a UAV into the Earth’s stratosphere.
The stratosphere is precisely where the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere is found, which is also where our ozone is, located above the tropics on the ground (or, in the water, if you want to get super technical about it).
The upcoming flights are only just a few of the many that we can expect in the near and distant future. NASA had planned a year-round campaign that will actually last a couple of years for the purpose of studying the changes in the water vapor, where they are happening, determine what could happen if this keeps happening based on the important data and information they will be collecting, and a lot more.
Overall, however, NASA is sending the UAV into the Earth’s stratosphere for the main purpose of figuring out how something as simple as water vapor going into our stratosphere on a constant, regular basis will affect our Earth.
They are also sending the UAV up there to figure out how far along global warming is based on the water vapor, the condition of our ozone layer, and to figure out which changes are taking place on an exact level based on the water vapor and how it’s pushing global warming along.
All in all, this is actually a pretty cool use of drones, more or less unusual for some, but it may just save humanity as we know it.
All of the Crazy Things You Can Do With a Drone
When you think about all the neat and crazy things that can be done with drones, it really makes you question what else these awesome pieces of hardware could help us accomplish in the next couple of years.
Jack Brown is a true drone passionate and he focused his education on this amazing field. Thus, he graduated the Drone/UAV Pilot Training Certificate program and now he’s a member of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. His main purpose right now is to find and develop new features and help others discover the wonderful experience of flying a drone. For this, he is the main editor and content creator at MyDroneLab Blog where you can find everything you want to know about drones.
