Criminals once only had to worry about cops arriving in squad cars - now the silent arm of the law is striking from the sky.
In South Africa drones are increasingly being used for fighting crime and soon robots could be joining in to finger the bad guys.
In the next few months, fix-winged drone aircraft may be flying over Botswana helping to catch rhino and elephant poachers.
The difference with these drones is that they will be using artificial intelligence (AI) to help their human operators identify poachers. The technology has been developed by researchers at the University of Southern California.
The reason for the technology is that humans were having difficulty using infrared cameras and differentiating between the heat sources given off by poachers and that of animals. Another problem is that humans get tired.
“We tried having a monitoring team watch those videos all night to locate potential poachers. That turned out not to work, as it is difficult to watch those videos all night,” says Elizabeth Bondi of the University of Southern California.
The system is called Spot, or Systematic Poacher Detector.
"The idea is that AI will identify a target and the operator will verify if it is a poacher or not, then they will call law enforcement,” Bondi says.
When the system was deployed in Zimbabwe and Malawi, it initially took up to 10 seconds to process an image.
The lag time made it difficult to spot potential targets from a moving vehicle.
Air Shepherd, an organisation that promotes the use of technology in conservation, will be testing Spot.
They have used drones in the past to combat poaching in southern Africa.
“You need real-time identification, so you can react,” says Rob Hannaford, head of Air Shepherd.
The idea is that the AI-
enabled drone will be part of an integrated team. While the drone is in the air patrolling an area that has been identified as a poaching hot spot, an anti-poaching unit will be on standby.
If something suspicious is detected, the AI system alerts the operator, who then gets the aircraft to hover over the area.
The anti-poaching team is then directed to the target spot.
As many teams aren’t equipped with night vision optics, says Hannaford, the drone operator will guide them in, making sure they don’t run into any dangerous game.
The drones being used can stay in the air for over two hours and at 400 feet can’t be heard on the ground.
“You will only hear them when they are 30m above you,” explains Hannaford.
“The AI thing is going to be enormous. It could be used for a number of security and engineering applications.”
It might take a while before AI-armed drones make it to the skies above South Africa, but already these whisper-silent aircraft are having an effect on crime fighting.
Hannaford’s company, UAV&Drone Solutions, is using drone technology to counter container and copper theft.
He says they have arrested many people, even changing the way criminals work.