![\"worker](\"https:\/\/gcn.com\/articles\/2019\/01\/18\/~\/media\/GIG\/EDIT_SHARED\/Drones\/drone.png\")
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From their beginnings as tech toys, small drones have evolved into a dependable tool for agencies at all levels of government. Benefits of unmanned aerial systems include greater efficiency, cost savings and increased safety for government workers when drones reach places and do jobs that could endanger humans. Many officials, however, are still figuring out how to navigate this fairly new technology.<\/p>\n
To be accurate, the government has been using unmanned aircraft since the 1930s, said Chris Hewlett, who leads Deloitte\u2019s drones unit, but now small, lightweight, ready-to-use devices not unlike the ones advertised in Amazon\u2019s daily deals list are finding their way into government use in nontraditional ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you think about the way that many of our aerospace and defense companies operate, they make something because there\u2019s a need," Hewlett said. "But in this particular technology, the way it\u2019s advanced, it\u2019s very unique. It\u2019s a solution looking for a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once drones became available, agencies realized they could integrate them into their current processes to gain efficiencies. "That\u2019s a key statement there," he said. "It wasn\u2019t, \u2018We have a key problem doing this. We\u2019re looking to see if we can make our process better.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s one reason why figuring out the best way to use drones can be tricky. There are several factors to consider, Hewlett said, including cybersecurity and safety. For one, the Federal Aviation Administration has regulations on when commercial and government entities can fly small UAS, which it defines as those that weigh less than 55 pounds. It\u2019s also critical that these systems not interfere with airspace where manned aircraft may be flying or endanger people on the ground.<\/p>\n Additionally, \u201cwhen you\u2019re talking about drones, you\u2019re talking about the challenge of cybersecurity, data control and then telemetry information,\u201d Hewlett said. Many drones made overseas may communicate with a server in a foreign country to get telemetry and firmware updates they need to operate. That means a government laptop could be communicating with a foreign server, he said, and that the telemetry data on where the drone has been flying could be downloaded to a server in that home country.<\/p>\n Despite the regulations and security concerns, opportunities for using drones are seemingly limitless. At the federal level, for instance, the Transportation Department\u2019s Federal Highway Administration supported the development of first-person vision googles to guide drones in bridge inspection. Workers wear goggles<\/a> connected to drones that fly around a bridge and send back images that the worker sees in the goggles.<\/p>\n This effort trickles down to state and local governments, which need to maintain it the infrastructure they own. Minnesota<\/a>, for example, has been experimenting with drones since 2015 to scan bridges and their hard-to-access areas. The Georgia Department of Transportation used drones for bridge inspections after Hurricane Irma hit in 2017, and the Kansas Department of Transportation (one of 10 that the federal DOT tapped to participate in its UAS Integration Pilot Program<\/a>) also is exploring using drones for infrastructure inspection.<\/p>\n Public-safety organizations are also significant drone users. In May 2018, the Center for the Study of Drones at Bard College estimated<\/a> that at least 910 state and local police, sheriff, fire and emergency services agencies nationwide have acquired drones, and that the number of public-safety agencies with drones rose by 82 percent between 2017 and 2018.<\/p>\n Public-safety officials use drones for search and rescue<\/a>, crime scene and accident investigation<\/a>, tactical maneuvers by SWAT team members, locating fleeing suspects<\/a> and fire response.<\/p>\n Other state and local agencies have sent drones to snap aerial imagery, as Murfreesboro, Tenn., officials are doing<\/a>, and to monitor highway traffic, a project<\/a> of the Ohio Department of Transportation.<\/p>\n Even as more agencies adopt drone technology, their deployment will require investment beyond the purchase of the device and software. <\/p>\n \u201cOne obvious challenge is public perception — the messaging around drone operations,\u201d said Dan Gettinger, co-director of the Center for the Study of Drones at Bard College. \u201cYou have to develop a messaging campaign to inform the public about how this new technology will be used today and into the future, and ideally publish standard operating procedures for using these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Agencies must also consider costs — not just of acquiring the drones themselves but also storing and maintaining them and training people to operate them, he added.<\/p>\n Before an agency acquires and deploys a drone, officials must determine what they want to use it for, set data and telemetry security policies and consider how weather conditions will affect use cases because drones can\u2019t fly in rain or extreme cold.<\/p>\n \u201cDefine what the problem is first and see if there\u2019s an application that\u2019s available or a technology that\u2019s available that we can use to solve that situation instead of just saying, \u2018I have this technology. Let\u2019s see how many problems I can solve with it,\u2019\u201d Hewlett said.<\/p>\n Those problems could be myriad. For example, military needs differ greatly from those of a rural public-safety department, which might have a different problem set than an urban police department or suburban fire department, Gettinger said. \u201cAgencies acquire drones for different reasons and deploy them for different reasons, but essentially what it comes down to is having that eye in the sky, having that capability to have that aerial picture,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be different approaches and different standard operating procedures for different environments, but I think the demand, the reason why these agencies are flying drones, is pretty consistent.\u201d<\/p>\n Although drone use is growing — the Pentagon\u2019s drone budget of about $8.6 billion for fiscal 2019 is the largest the drone center has seen — it\u2019s still an emerging area, Gettinger and Hewlett said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere we\u2019re at right now is in the nascent discovery phase of what kind of solutions can we bring to some of the problems that we have,\u201d Hewlett said.<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps something we\u2019re going to start seeing is greater moving away from the wow factor of having a drone in your inventory to really addressing ways in which the technology can be put to good use,\u201d Gettinger said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n About the Author<\/p>\n Stephanie Kanowitz is a freelance writer based in northern Virginia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is it time to buy a drone?<\/p>\n From their beginnings as tech toys, small drones have evolved into a dependable tool for agencies at all levels of government. Benefits of unmanned aerial systems include greater efficiency, cost savings and increased safety for government workers when drones reach places and do jobs that could endanger humans. Many officials, however, are still figuring out how to navigate this fairly new technology.<\/p>\n To be accurate, the government has been using unmanned aircraft since the 1930s, said Chris Hewlett, who leads Deloitte\u2019s drones unit, but now small, lightweight, ready-to-use devices not unlike the ones advertised in Amazon\u2019s daily deals list are finding their way into government use in nontraditional ways.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you think about the way that many of our aerospace and defense companies operate, they make something because there\u2019s a need,” Hewlett said. “But in this particular technology, the way it\u2019s advanced, it\u2019s very unique. It\u2019s a solution looking for a pr..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/a> <\/p>\n