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from the on-Comet-on-Cupid-on-Donner-and-Roadkill dept.
There's good news for Rudolph and his friends—an app is helping officials reduce the number of reindeer killed in traffic accidents in Finland. Some 300,000 reindeer freely wander the wilds of Lapland in Arctic Finland. An estimated 4,000 are killed every year through road accidents, officials say, and compensation to reindeer herders can be expensive.
[...] A simple, one-button interface allows drivers to tap their smartphone screens to register any reindeer spotted near roads. Using GPS technology, it creates a 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) warning zone that lasts for an hour and warns other app users approaching the area. "If there are reindeer, (drivers) reduce speed," Ylinampa said. "When they have passed the warning place, then they can get back to the normal speed again."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 28 2016, @02:44PM
A simple, one-button interface
The innovation is the UI.
Waze and other services have had that functionality on smartphones for years. There are two problems with Waze. One is on the supply side, if you're going 80 mph and you see a deer (or a cop or whatever you gotta announce) it takes 10 seconds to grab the phone, 5 to unlock, 30 to find the app, 20 to start the slow as F app, 30 second to navigate thru the menus to find the "you've got deer" button, then maybe another 10 second to make your report. At 80 MPH you're miles away by the time you make a report and unless the deer is running along side as fast as it can, the report is gonna be useless. On the demand side there's nothing I can do but brace myself for the collision. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Alt-route because a deer was there 15 minutes ago but is long gone now? Slam on the breaks and get rear ended or spin off the road when I haven't even personally seen the deer yet?
It helps a little that a hardware button is faster making the warning more useful (well, in theory) so perhaps I could warn the five cars behind me if I see a deer. If any of them are using the app.
Mostly waze makes people think they're making a difference, and think they're informed, when they clearly are not although I'm sure it feels very good at the time. Which makes it political, waze is inherently far left wing, very progressive, in the thought process itself behind the app.
Of course you know people like raising hell so they'll be people hitting buttons for fun just to mess with the population.
Now what would be useful and maybe even possible is the aircraft carrier concept of every car has a drone hanger full of rechargeable drones and you got three drones in the air providing close air support for your car at all times. I suspect a drone could physically scare the hell out of a deer if the drone decided the deer was going to get hit. Or warn off a little kid, maybe. I suppose in high traffic areas the drones could cooperate so you'd only launch one, and you'd only need a three drone skirmish line for dark country roads, maybe.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:01PM
Yes, yes, yes... 3 times a yes!!! Even better, the more, the merrier ... having things swarming around you head (or car for this matter) is pure joy [wikipedia.org]
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:20PM
It is surprising video drone downlinks aren't being merged into self driving cars. It should be trivial for a self driving car to parallelize its video inputs to get far better situational awareness than a human driven car could ever have, and the car is essentially an infinite source of recharging power even if the drones only individually have 5 minutes of flight ability. If you're planning a route in a city you could send the drones ahead to check it out.
For the military obviously if you can see it you can kill it, so drones are not popular idea for armor, at least not for ambushes LOL, but if the tank is kinda going "active mode" rather than passive maybe it would work for IED avoidance and stuff. If you're firing the main cannon you're not all that well hidden anyway so may as well launch the surveillance drones to make sure you're not getting flanked.
To say nothing of secret service detail type applications. Assuming they aren't already doing this, of course. You might only have ten protective agents in a transportation caravan but maybe 200 eyes circulating all over continuously, maybe 2000 eyes with extensive computer automation. Sure, go drive by that Texas book depository, nothing bad can happen because there's a drone literally hovering above every window, every single window has its observation drone, watching for anything weird.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @07:00PM
In the winter the reflective collars work better as does driving at a safe and controllable speed adjusted for the conditions. The herds can be spread out, so reaching for the phone can take your attention enough off the road that you run into the main group or the outliers.
As far as chasing the reindeer with drones, it might be fun but they could ignore them like they do now with the helicopters. A while back some reindeer herders, mostly in Sweden, got the idea to chase them with the helicopters. It worked great for a while, but then when the reindeer figured out there was no harm, they'd just hunker down in the rotor wash and wait for the helicopter to go away.
I've worked and traveled a lot in reindeer herding areas and once visited various herding areas in Russia, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Currently I live in such a zone. Neighbors herd (of sorts) and the sorting yard / slaughter yard is a short walk out back.
Personality-wise the reindeer are more like a cross between a cat and a donkey than a white tail deer. They're quite inquisitive and friendly and stubborn. They will occasionally jump sideways into the path of the car when trotting along the side. There are usually a few key animals that the herd follow, an animal or two that the herd gather around, some that dig access to the food under the snow, and a key animal or two that stay on the periphery, and many more. If you could get a long-life GPS on a key reindeer or two that the herd gather around, then you could have real time proximity warnings.
Then again they are not tall even if they are a bit heavy. So if you have a pickup truck and stout roo bars, you'll not have to watch out as much for reindeer, though moose will be no less deadly. But so far I've not seen anyone import roo bars from Australia.