> an unnamed mayor asked the Marine Corps to use a drone to find potholes in the mayor's city
Let's play a guessing game! San Diego? We've got Miramar and Camp Pendleton here, along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible potholes. Although the city certainly doesn't need help finding potholes around here...
Using drones for this kind of thing actually makes a lot of sense, although not a $20 million militarized Predator.
> Using drones for this kind of thing actually makes a lot of sense, although not a $20 million militarized Predator.
The later might make some sense, though, as part of training for the drone operators. Spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street such as a pothole could require similar skills to spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street due to someone having buried a timed or remote-control explosive there.
Similar considerations could apply to many other uses of military drones in civilian operations. Using a military drone to find a missing hiker in a state park, for example, would involve similar skills to using a drone to find a missing military pilot shot down in hostile territory.
In fact, aside from actually shooting guns or missiles at people or dropping bombs, I'd expect that for most skills that a military drone pilot needs for their military missions there are civilian situations where those same skills are useful, and for which using their skills in those civilian situations would improve their ability to do their military missions.
As long as proper safeguards are in place to make sure that they are not put to use in ways that violate our rights, and these civilian uses have a military justification (such as providing cheap or convenient training for the drone operators), I'm open to considering allowing these uses.
>The later might make some sense, though, as part of training for the drone operators. Spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street such as a pothole could require similar skills to spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street due to someone having buried a timed or remote-control explosive there.
Okay never thought of that situation, it would be a good training scenario.
One drawback of this is that some populations are less likely to contribute (eg: immigrants with poor English, poorer communities that don't trust civil authorities, short-term residents in an area filled with rentals) so you end up prioritizing by citizen engagement level and not just by actual pothole level.
You can also report potholes on Waze. Some city governments actively follow Waze [0], so it would be easy for people to report potholes, and the government to watch and see where they need to be filled.
That seems like a good idea but a slight overkill. Why not allow the residents to submit specific location info/pictures of potholes? I wouldn't want to send the city of Boston every car trip I take--especially since I usually do my best to drive around potholes and then it wouldn't be registered in the app.
Your cost is a little off. The Predator system costs $20 million which includes 4 aircraft and a ground station. Each aircraft is roughly $4 million.
According to Time Magazine the operating cost of a single MQ-1 Predator per flight hour is $3,679 which might actually make it cost effective depending on the size of the area to be imaged.
There are both crowdsourced and fleet-oriented apps and systems to do that, and anyone in charge of a bid would know this within 5 minutes of googling the topic from a cold start. It is such a lame excuse I'm inclined to call BS and think it's a cover story.
It's either a cover or the kind of propaganda gig that you see in military dictatorships - "Troops rescue cat from tree!" "Paratroopers deployed to give children candy!" "Death squad visits old people's home with cake!"
For just potholes, yeah, but there is a lot of other municipal infrastructure that could benefit from aerial inspection, especially if they are in non-public, low traffic or otherwise inaccessible areas.
It wouldn't surprise me at all. Up here in Carlsbad, someone is flying an IMSI catcher over the city out of Palomar every couple of weeks or so. I have no doubt they wouldn't bat an eyelash at flying military drones in the sky.
Let's play a guessing game! San Diego? We've got Miramar and Camp Pendleton here, along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible potholes. Although the city certainly doesn't need help finding potholes around here...
Using drones for this kind of thing actually makes a lot of sense, although not a $20 million militarized Predator.