The spread of parcel-delivering drones may minimise the number of porch thefts
makes buying things easier, but has also led to the rise of a new kind of thief: the porch pirate. Porch pirates scour door steps for deliveries that have been made when a householder was out, and nab them. Sometimes, they will stalk delivery vans to do so. Residents of New York City, for example, lose an astonishing 90,000 parcels every day to porch pirates, according to a report in thePorch piracy is a problem that may be solved by the spread of parcel-delivering drones.
That is nowhere near as easy as it might sound. Drones are lean machines, provided with only enough battery strength, computing power and payload-carrying capacity to do the job they are designed for. Adding threat-detection measures, such as heavy, power-hungry radar antennae, or spinning lidar units, radar’s optical equivalent, would either reduce range or prevent lift-off in the first place.
The Doppler effect is the frequency shift heard as a source of sound approaches or recedes. It is, for example, the reason the pitch of a police siren changes as a patrol car passes in the street. To take advantage of it Dr Roy and Mr Garg plan to fit drones with diminutive loudspeakers, like those found in smartphones. These would broadcast an ultrasonic tone outward from the drone. Similarly tiny microphones would then listen for reflections from incoming objects.
To test the principle of what they call their DopplerDodge drone defence system, Dr Roy and Mr Garg have constructed a static version in their laboratory, and have been throwing objects of various sizes and shapes at it, as if it were a hovering drone. At the moment, it can detect these objects from distances of up to four metres away. That is pretty close, but would still give a drone a tenth of a second’s notice of an incoming missile.
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