Scientists Found a 4-Propeller Solution to a 200-Ton Question

An animal’s weight is more than just a random characteristic: It’s a window into understanding fundamental truths about how animals survive. By weighing animals, experts glean insights into how much those animals eat, how quickly they and their population are growing and — perhaps most crucially — how outside stressors like the byproducts of human life can impact their health. 
That information is a crucial launching pad for conservationists to determine how best to protect these species.
But weighing especially large mammals isn’t easy. When it comes to whales, which can grow over 100 feet long and weigh upward of 200 tons, scientists have had to rely on the limited information provided by dead specimens that were caught in fishing nets, washed up on shore or were intentionally killed for the purpose of research. Though obviously better than no specimens at all, this narrow scope pales in comparison to what scientists could learn from live specimens, especially as whales come under increased threat.
That’s where drones come in.
Scientists have figured out a way to pair drone photographs with historical data, using the combined information to develop a model used that accurately calculates a whale’s body volume and mass. The new model can be used to track both individual whales and various species over time.
This breakthrough, which was published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in October, is an important step in both researching and protecting whales. 
“Knowing the body mass of free-living whales opens up new avenues of research,” Fredrick Christiansen, the lead researcher of the study from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, told Cosmos.
Standing on the deck of sailboats, researchers controlled drones and took photos of 86 southern right whales. Though these photos helped create a model endemic to this species of whale, scientists believe the approach can be adjusted for use with other large marine animals.
“Weighing live whales with a drone at sea, we can get growth rates and changes in body conditions,” Michael Moore, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a co-author of the study told Cape Cod Times. “We learn a lot more about stressors like food, what lack of food does to animals.”
Moore also noted that the model can help when trying to detangle whales from fishing gear. The model will allow veterinarians and conservationists to give an accurate dose of sedatives when freeing the whale. 
Two co-authors of the study are already using the model to look at the links between survival rates of southern right whale calves and kelp gull harassment, which is when birds land on the backs of the calves and attack, which can negatively impact the calves’ health and survival rates.
Co-authors Mariano Sironi and Marcela Uhart, from the Southern Right Whale Health Monitoring Program, told Cosmos that “the use of drones to estimate whale weight and condition, as well as to individually track calves while they grow beside their mothers, has been a real breakthrough in our investigation.” 
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Forget Clickbait. This Is How Technology Improves News Reporting

Steve Grove, a onetime print reporter at the Boston Globe and a broadcast journalist for ABC News, joined YouTube and helped the homemade video site influence world events (becoming a platform for investigative video reportage like Sen. George Allen using the obscure racial insult “macaca” and a way to mobilize millions, such as President Obama and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” music video). Today, as head of Google’s News Lab, he’s enthused about virtual reality and big data becoming an integral part of storytelling. NationSwell spoke to Grove from Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters about the future of newsrooms.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
[T]o make it something that you practice, not something that you are. I tell my team at Google all the time, “You’re all leaders.” What I mean by that (this comes from some books I’ve read, a few classes I’ve taken and also my own experience) is leadership is helping a group that is facing a challenge grapple with it in an honest and productive way. It’s really getting to the root of what a problem is, engaging in various interventions or techniques to really get to the core issue they’re trying to solve. Great leaders are able to exercise leadership, not just embody it.

What’s on your nightstand?
I just finished a book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” which is about the modern economy and how technology has actually, in some ways, made us more distant from the actual work-product. The guy who wrote it was a motorcycle mechanic, and he talks about the power of working with your hands and how the trades are actually a really active way to use your mind and develop yourself. It’s not just an argument for, hey, you need to go start your own mechanic shop, but that you should understand how the things you own work.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
There are all kinds of new storytelling devices that are making journalism and frontiers really hopeful. While getting traffic to your site is a challenge and thinking about catchy titles or even clickbait is part of a conversation, deeper, more immersive storytelling is even more exciting and differentiates your site or broadcast. Virtual reality’s a part of that. You’re not just clicking and leaving: you dive into it. But another really interesting development (we’re not quite there yet) is journalism via drones. It’s really powerful for things like crisis response… and climate journalism — looking at ways different ecosystems have changed and are changing from above. It’s just a totally new perspective. There’s lots of challenges to figure out there ethically and technologically, but that’s exciting.

Data journalism itself is probably one of the biggest frontiers for journalism right now. It takes a massive amount of computing power that we now have, the extraordinary access to data sets we didn’t have before and a shift of how newsrooms think about telling stories. We, of course, work on Google data in that space, but ProPublica, FiveThirtyEight, The UpShot, Vox — they’re all really innovative data-driven journalism. That’s one of the things we’re betting big on: that data journalism has a huge potential for making readers around the world smarter about topics they’re discovering. Newsrooms are beginning to understand there’s never been a better time to be a storyteller, given the tools they have.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish somebody had told me to lead with passion and manage with consistency. A lot of leaders are very good at one, but not the other. They can crisply manage a spreadsheet, a meeting schedule, a document and metrics tracker, but they don’t have the vision or the passion to lead an organization. Other leaders give the inspiration and purpose. That’s great, but the management piece falls off a little bit, because it’s harder for them to operationally develop things. Most leaders need to have both. I wish someone had defined that for me. I came into my work with the former — the passion and excitement — and I don’t think I was incapable of the latter, but I didn’t know when to toggle between the two.

What inspires you?
What’s most inspiring to me about my time at Google is amplifying stories or voices that wouldn’t have otherwise been heard. You look at YouTube as a platform for that, or the Internet in general as a chance to discover stories that wouldn’t have otherwise made it into our conversations — that’s a really powerful additive element of technology in media. Whether that’s citizen-captured videos from streets of the Arab Spring or whether that’s someone “coming out” to their community on a blog or whether that’s a kid in his bedroom in Philly or a mom in her house in Montana getting to ask the President a question in a Google+ Hangout, there’s all kinds of elements that plays itself out.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I feel very fortunate to have had some amazing experiences at Google. But if I had to pick something I was most proud of, I might go back to before I was a journalist, in my early twenties, when I spent about half a year in India. I just sort of went; I didn’t know anybody there. I bought a plane ticket and landed in Bombay [now Mumbai]. I wanted to do something that went beyond being a tourist, but I didn’t know what. I ended up finding the opportunity to work for an organization that did interventions in small rural Indian towns to try to get 30,000 people above the poverty line. They would help these people grow mango forests or cross-breed cows to create their own dairies. I [wrote] profiles of the people who this group was helping. I got to spend two months in rural villages, finding my own translators, talking to different people who were in these situations. It wasn’t the best journalism or work I’d ever done, but early in my career, it was a really transformative experience.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

Home page photo courtesy of Steve Grove.

MORE: The Software That Could Enable Drones to Go Mainstream

The Technology That Promises to Save America’s Decaying Infrastructure

On an evening in August 2007, Minneapolis commuters sat in rush-hour traffic on the I-35 highway bridge that spanned the Mississippi River. Some drivers probably glanced at the construction crew resurfacing the concrete deck of the eight-lane, steel truss structure. Suddenly, a terrible wrenching noise sliced through the summer night. People screamed and honked their horns. A section of the bridge plummeted 60 feet straight down into the river, and the rest of the structure crumpled, sending 50 cars sliding into the water.

The collapse, which resulted in 13 deaths and 145 injuries, pointed to the importance of repairing aging infrastructure. As a result, Minnesota’s Department of Transportation (MnDOT) looked into new ways to conduct their biennial inspections on the state’s 12,961 bridges that carry traffic (830 of which urgently need repairs). Recently, drones replaced workers at several inspection sites, allowing the agency to get a closer look at the structures without closing a lane of traffic and sending a worker over the edge.

The eight lane bridge spanning the Mississippi River near Minneapolis’s downtown was undergoing repair work when it collapsed during the evening rush hour.

MnDOT uses the senseFly eXOM drone, a four-pound machine resembling a bumblebee that was specially built for mapping and inspection. Hooked up with an LED light and a camera, the drone can illumine dark spaces and capture detailed pictures. Oftentimes, the images have better resolution than inspectors can snap with a digital camera, while either perched atop a cherrypicker or suspended by rope underneath a bridge, says Jennifer Zink, a state bridge inspection engineer. A drone’s flight controller can toggle with an infrared camera, giving heat-sensing capabilities to pick up on distressed spots in the concrete.

The technology not only gathers better data, it also keeps workers safe. Even when traffic lanes are closed, a surprising number of drivers head into a work zone, swerving away from disaster at the last minute. The drone, on the other hand, steers clear of any objects, automatically bouncing away when it detects something closer than one to five feet.

The site of the collapse, Blatnik Bridge in Duluth, Minn., now uses drones to inspect the infrastructure.

Zink says the MnDOT team has been excited to innovate with new technology, but the law still lags behind, restricting when and where they can fly. There’s a lot of bridges in the state, Zink says, but with drones, managing their safety doesn’t seem like such a high-flying task.

MORE: While Roads and Rails Crumble, These 3 Projects Are Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure

 
 

4 Startups Revolutionizing How Food Is Produced in the U.S.

Ask city dwellers what an American farmer looks like and it’s likely that they’ll describe an image reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting: a man sporting overalls and a John Deere hat, bouncing his daughter on his lap as he steers a combine through his corn fields. In truth, today’s agrarian ideal is much different. Instead of rusty tractors working the land, fields are hooked up with the same modern technology used in Silicon Valley.
As part of our continuing coverage of FarmNext’s nationwide listening tour on food and young farmers, NationSwell talked to a few tech-savvy individuals building systems that can more efficiently feed America.

Drones

Trevor Witt, a third-year student at Kansas State University in Salina, spends most of his days flying unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. He’s involved in a project in the school’s entomology department — with “the bug guys,” as he says — studying techniques for early detection of invasive species. Witt spent the summer mapping sorghum fields, looking for evidence of an aphid that can ruin an entire harvest in just a few weeks. “If you can detect that aphid early on, you can spray that specific area to get rid of it,” Witt explains. With a camera shooting in high-resolution visuals and near-infrared imagery, Witt’s drone flies over fields of crops, looking for a shiny, sugar-dense resin on the top of leaves and a black underside — the telltale sign of this aphid’s infestation.
Witt, who dates his interest in unmanned aircraft to his high school shop class, says the primary goal of his research at K-State is “dealing with information overload.” His team is “translating all this data that we can collect and make actionable solutions,” he says. “Earlier, using satellites, the data pixel had a 15-acre resolution; now data pixel resolution is sub-centimeter. It just gets significant amounts of data even in the smallest field.”
For now, the farmer must take action against the infestation himself. But eventually, perhaps a decade from now, a grower won’t have to do a thing: he’ll have another drone or self-driven tractor that can automatically spray the area. “That’s the end goal when it comes to mapping,” Witt says. Unmanned aircraft systems aren’t the end-all solution, he concedes, but it’s “an extra tool in the toolkit.”

The Henlight helps chickens maintain high egg production levels, even during winter months. Courtesy of Edward Silva.

Solar Power

To lay the optimal number of eggs, a hen needs a full 16 hours of light. That’s an impossibly high bar for small farmers to reach during the winter, when a December day at California’s Riverdog Farms, for example, only receives eight and a half hours of sunshine — causing production to drop anywhere from 30 to 60 percent. (During that time, chickens continue to consume the same amount of feed.) Most large farms employ artificial lighting to stimulate production, but the cost can be prohibitively high for small-scale farmers to invest in the technology.
Egg producers “take those seasonal changes pretty hard,” says Edward Silva, who developed a solar-powered supplemental lighting system called Henlight as an undergraduate at University of California, Davis. Programmed by software, the Henlight “comes on in the morning hours, a little before sunrise. The very darkest days, it comes on earlier,” he says. “It doesn’t wake [the chickens] up. Eventually they rustle up, but what’s happening is that laying hens receive the okay to reproduce through a gland on the top of their head.”
According to Silva, who grew up on a farm in the Central Valley, field data from one coop using the Henlight in Capay Valley, Calif. saw a 20 percent boost in egg production — laying an additional 2,253 eggs — compared to a control group. Sold at $3 a dozen, the farmer made $563, meaning that he got a return on the $450 investment in the first year.
“There’s this movement where tech in ag is becoming much more democratic,” says Silva. “Smaller farms can optimize their operations as well. With Uber, anyone can be a taxi driver; with Aribnb, anyone can open a hotel. In agriculture, with a lot of precision sensors, with smartphones and drones, the systems are allowing small-scale guys to be competitive with what’s existing on a bigger level.”

Graduate student Donald Gibson in his greenhouse. Courtesy of Donald Gibson.

Genetics

Donald Gibson is trying to grow a better tomato. A graduate student at University of California, Davis is using cutting-edge biotech that would allow tomato plants to grow with far less phosphorous, a vital nutrient (along with nitrogen and potassium) that’s increasingly costly and environmentally damaging to extract for fertilizer. When lacking phosphorous, a tomato expends much of its energy expanding its root system. By identifying and switching off the gene that activates that response, the fruit could grow with much less of the nutrient.
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have earned the wrath from the organic crowd for altering a plant’s fundamentals, but Gibson argues his research will make agriculture sustainable. “Today we’re seeing a major shift in advances in plant breeding. There’s been a boom in the biotech field in the last 20 or 30 years, a technology revolution and also a biological revolution. Now finally, we’re using brand new technology and adapting that to select better and better plants,” he says. “When it comes to GMOs, it’s actually getting a lot better from the consumer perspective.” Most of the innovation in the field has benefited farmers, but the next generation will benefit consumers with products like a potato that doesn’t bruise or an apple that doesn’t brown as quickly.

Data Analytics

FarmLink is employing analytics to help farmers decipher big data and turn it into actionable items, moving agriculture from maps on paper that tracked annual yields to create more precise information. “There is plenty of data out there, and the data increases every day. It’s not that we need more data,” says Kevin Helkes, FarmLink’s director of operations. “Farmers are saying they need to know what to do with that data.”
Helkes compares the farmers’ fields to a front lawn. “There’s always that part of the yard that’s higher, where the grass grows taller. It’s the same thing in the field. Farmers know that year over year, this area is higher and this area is lower,” he says. What’s new, though, is that data analytics will be able to tell a farmer how productive those high and low areas could potentially be. Instead of a grower learning the hard way that he’s been wasting money on a fallow spot of land, FarmLink can communicate in advance how much he can expect from an area.
Agriculture’s first great revolution was switching from a donkey towing a plow to a tractor trailer. Now, agriculture has reinvented itself with new improvements in genetics and feed. This is called Ag 3.0.
 
(Homepage photograph: Courtesy of Gregory Urqiaga/University of California, Davis) 
 

The Software That Could Enable Drones to Go Mainstream

The skies may soon be filled with more than birds, insects and planes.
Airware, a startup gathering rapid momentum, has invented what MIT News calls, “the DOS of drones.” In other words, the company has created a reliable base hardware on which other businesses can customize and expand — giving them the ability to customize drone sensors, cameras and communication devices, for example, taking drones out of the military and into everyday society.
The Linux-based autopilot device c an be as universal to drones as Intel and Microsoft’s DOS were to the progression of computers.
CEO and founder Jonathan Downey says to ABC, “I think nobody understood all of the different apps that would be on your phone before there was a platform like Android or IOS.”
Airware’s platform handles the basic software and hardware, as well as the cloud services that host and transmit the data the drones collect. Before the advent of this new invention, applying different uses to drones took a lot of work and time, but this software eliminates the process.
“In 2011, we identified a significant gap in the market,” he said. “Military autopilots were too inflexible and expensive and hobbyist projects weren’t safe or reliable enough for commercial use.”
Since capitalizing on this ‘gap in the market,’ Airware has gathered significant funding ($25 million in one instance on top of the $40 million already invested) from a variety of investors, including G.E., who hope to use the drones for uses such as the collection of data on defunct wind turbines or agriculture crop management.
This innovation also bears good news to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), who are set to vote on commercial drone usage in 2015. Downey thinks having an umbrella platform for all commercial drones will gather favor in the decision.
“Rather than see a world where there’s 500 drones flying overhead, and every drone has different software and electronics, it’s good for the FAA if all of them had reliable and common hardware and software,” he says.
MORE: How the America of Tomorrow Will Look

The Drone That Can Decompose Without a Trace

A drone that’s made from living things. Sounds like something straight out of Frankenstein, right?
Turns out, this drone, which is made by Evocative Design, is constructed (almost) entirely out of organic material that, in the event of getting irretrievably lost, will biodegrade. And while this may summon a plethora of spy images (The Atlantic reports of a study in which 70 percent of its 115 participants reported thinking ‘military’ upon hearing the word ‘drone’), Lynn Rothschild, head researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center and Evocative Design collaborator, states that this was not their intent.
Rather, the biodrone’s intended purpose is to collect data on fragile ecosystems (i.e. coral reefs) without disturbing them. It is made from a root-like fungal material called mycellum, houses circuity printed in silver nanoparticle ink and is coated with bacteria grown sheets constructed of proteins cloned from the saliva of paper wasps.
“There are definitely parts that can’t be replaced by biology,” says team member Raman Nelakanti to New Scientist Magazine, though they’re now trying to create biodegradable sensors out of E. coli bacteria.
“No one would know if you’d spilled some sugar water or if there’d been an airplane there,” says Rothschild about the scene of a degrading drone.
The potential for this new technology is immense, but some still express concern over potential over usage.
Ella Atkins, aerospace engineer at University of Michigan and supporter of biodrones, cautions, “We don’t want biodegradable drones to rain down from the sky […] even if they will eventually biodegrade.”

How the America of Tomorrow Will Look

Do you think technology is improving our world? Or are you more of a Luddite and believe that we’d be better off without technological advancements?
Almost two-thirds of Americans believe tech innovation will result in a better future, while one-third think people’s lives will get worse, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center.
Regardless, the rapid pace at which Silicon Valley is driving change is a force to be reckoned with. Technology has brought about a seismic shift in everything from transportation and real estate to the broadcast industry and dating. To illustrate where we’re headed, the New York Times asked some of the tech world’s biggest luminaries about what we can expect, and how often we’ll see drone-filled skies or Google Glass users on the street.
The lineup: Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and inventor of the first widely-used internet browser Mosaic; Ev Williams, the founder and chief executive of Medium.com and co-founder of Twitter; Susan Wojcicki, head of YouTube; Sebastian Thrun, co-founder and chief executive of Udacity, an inventor of driverless cars and a founder of Google X; Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn; Clara Shih, founder and chief executive of Hearsay Social; and Peter Thiel, an investor and co-founder of PayPal.
Here’s a glimpse at what they had to say:
It’s hard to imagine a time when cell phones were obsolete, but it took less than a decade to make them commonplace. Therefore, Andreessen thinks we can expect the same for everything from drones to remote education in the not-so-distant future. “Hundreds or thousands of drones flying to and fro for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “Getting a top-end college education without going to a physical campus. Cars driven by computers instead of humans.”
MORECould Technology Provide Solutions to Global Poverty?
Williams agrees the subtext of any major tech advancement will be convenience. “Phones and computers will automatically do anything tedious that doesn’t require brainpower, like signing up for a web site or app. The march of technology is the incessant march of convenience,” he said.
Implantable chips are not just a Hollywood depiction of what our future holds. Both Shih and Thrun believe that implantable devices will be a mainstay in our lives. “Implantable chips that monitor the number of steps we take, hours we sleep, all of our vital signs, blood chemistry and beyond,” Shih said. “The chip data will be used to adjust our medications, offer suggestions to change our behavior and automatically send an ambulance — self-driving, of course.”
Tech innovation has reshaped the way we eat, how we travel and how we interact with one another. As for which industries the tech world plans to tackle, Williams points to higher education while Hoffman believes the banking industry is on the horizon. “Consumer banking. Tech will unbundle banking for loans, payments, asset management and so on,” Hoffman said. Shih adds that the auto industry — whether it’s driverless cars, auto parts or auto insurance — will be a major focus for Silicon Valley as well.
As for novelties, we laugh at the mention of a Sony Walkman, but it seems the iPod will soon follow suit. Hoffman thinks we’ll also say goodbye to the computer mouse and city cars (“The computer mouse will soon be replaced. Think touch, swipe, rich hand gestures.”), while Thrun simply points to keys.
Though not tech related, Thiel contends playing with the pigskin will be a pastime we leave behind. “Football. We realize it is very harmful for you, but we haven’t yet reached the tipping point where it becomes broadly unacceptable to condone,” he said.
Of course, predicting the future is a tricky game. We’ve managed to survive the Mayan doomsday prediction of December 21, 2012, and we’re certainly not jetting around in flying cars. But if the major advancements made over the last decade are any indication, we’re headed for an interesting ride.
Check out the full Times infograph here.

Forget ‘Bridgegate.’ Here Are Six Innovators Trying to Fix the Daily Commute

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has found himself embroiled in scandal after texts and emails linked members of his administration to politically motivated lane closings. “Bridgegate,” or revenge by traffic jam, has topped headlines. But we here at NationSwell wondered: Aren’t there people in America trying to help drivers, not hinder them? In an effort to spotlight the problem-solvers, we rounded up some of the best innovators who are working to fix our traffic woes:

1) The startup that wants to make sitting at red lights more bearable

Matt Ginsberg, CEO of the Oregon startup Green Driver, has created an app that may alleviate the stress of being stuck at a red light. Called EnLighten, it uses real-time traffic data to count down when the light will change from red to green. A few seconds before the light changes, a chime goes off, allowing drivers to refocus attention on the road. Another benefit? If the technology is integrated with the car’s computer, a hybrid could more efficiently choose between gas and battery, meaning lots of savings for drivers. The free app is available in nine towns and cities, and Ginsberg plans to expand nationwide.
MORE: 9 Surprising Infrastructure Innovations Happening Right Here in America

2) The governor who’s trying to fix his state’s transportation infrastructure

New Jersey, take note: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and his administration have an ambitious plan that would substantially improve the state’s transportation system. Just last Friday, the governor unveiled a $12-billion, five-year transportation blueprint that called for an all-electronic tolling on the Massachusetts Turnpike, new buses and improved bus maintenance facilities, a seasonal train service between Boston and Cape Cod, and improvements to outdated bridges across the state.

3) The engineer who’s campaigning for more nighttime deliveries

Jose Holguin-Veras, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., has been conducting research for a dozen years in the hopes that he can convince businesses in cities like New York to take overnight deliveries. One of his studies found that deliveries made between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. could cut costs by 30 percent and, with fewer trucks on the road, could alleviate traffic during the day. Holguin-Veras is leading a program in conjunction with the New York City Department of Transportation, called deliverEASE, which has already enlisted 150 restaurants, grocery stores and retailers — including Whole Foods, Just Salad and Sysco — to take overnight deliveries. A good start for a city that accepts more than 200,000 deliveries every day.
MORE: Can a Crime-Reduction Method Also Prevent Traffic Accidents?

4) The official who fought for public transit

Steve Meyer, chief capital development officer for the Utah Transit Authority, faced an uphill battle when convincing Utah residents to embrace a Salt Lake Valley light rail. But thanks to the UTA’s strategy to unite people and the cities up and down the Salt Lake Valley corridor, the TRAX system was completed in August 2013, two years ahead of schedule and $340 million under budget. The UTA estimates that TRAX ridership saves 29,000 trips per day — enough to free up two lanes on Interstate 15 every day.

5) The professor whose algorithm may prevent traffic waves

Berthold Horn, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed an algorithm that might prevent traffic by helping drivers maintain the optimal distance between cars both in front of and behind them. Using the same technology that powers adaptive cruise control — where cars gauge how fast nearby vehicles are going using radar sensors or digital cameras — Horn’s system would have cars maintaining a distance halfway between the car ahead and the car behind. Most drivers only think about the distance ahead, but by also considering the distance of the car behind, one car’s sudden braking is less likely to trigger a chain reaction that causes a jam.

6) The traffic-easing drones everyone is waiting for

Though it isn’t immediately clear when transportation authorities might use such technology, universities are examining the way that drones could make our roads more efficient. At the Michigan Tech Research Institute, part of the Michigan Technological University, researchers are constructing drones that might one day be used to monitor the condition of unpaved roads, understand traffic patterns and evaluate conditions inside culverts. Another project in Georgia recently received funding from the Federal Highway Administration to understand how drones could help workers maintain road safety.
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