Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.
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43 unmanned systems inside April/May 2016 ENGINEERING. PRACTICE. POLICY. mans when they went into the forests to work and came in contact with infected monkeys and mosquitoes. But researchers noticed that people were getting infected even when they didn't enter the forests. So Kimberly Fornace of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine decided to see how land use patterns might have changed monkey or mosquito behavior. She started by building a map. Satellite imagery didn't work because the areas she was studying had too much cloud cover—and because Fornace wanted to moni- tor how clear-cutting was affecting malaria in real-time, not a few months down the road. Fornace deployed a senseFly eBee drone, a fixed-wing platform that launches by being thrown into the air. It f lew more than 100 f lights to photograph and map the area. Sure enough, after analyzing the informa- tion, Fornace found a link between deforesta- tion and malaria cases. But there's more work to be done. "We are hoping to understand m o r e a b o u t … h o w t h e s e clearings affect macaque movement and behav- ior or where people are likely to come in contact with mos- qu it o s ," For na c e wrote in an email. To h e l p w i t h that research, For- n a c e 's t e a m h a s d e p l o y e d a n o t h e r eBee, this time w ith an infrared camera to identify macaques and es- timate their population num- bers. And after testing 10,000 people in her study area for malaria, she's using the drone to "develop more detailed land clas- sifications and risk maps for P. knowlesi in different environments." "WE'RE TRYING TO ACCELERATE our timeline to be more responsive to things like dengue and zika." Douglas Norris, Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health TOP: The Project Premonition payload, seen here at a 2015 technology showcase, has four levels ringed with traps that snap shut when a mosquito is lured in. BOTTOM: Ethan Jackson, leader of Project Premonition for Microsoft Research, stands next to the showcase prototype. Photos courtesy of Dee Ann Divis