Nokia and Swisscom Broadcast today announced the launch of the largest Drones-as-a-Service network in the world, designed to augment Switzerland’s emergency response capabilities — and with it, they are putting AI in the sky.
The platform, Nokia Drone Networks, is designed to be used by large-scale public and commercial operators who need to deploy fast, flexible eyes in the sky during emergencies.
This new Swiss-based initiative follows on from a similar project launched in Belgium last November, run in alliance with Belgian firefighting services across the country. In both cases, the drones will be deployed in convenient ground station boxes, with human controllers managing them from remote locations across the country.
The drones are equipped with multi-sensor cameras, including infrared and thermal capabilities, as well as options such as LIDAR for additional scanning functionality, all managed by artificial intelligence models.
One key part of the platform, which is where Nokia’s extensive communications know-how comes into play, is the use of 5G wireless tech which gives total control beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). This ability to fly large distances and use cloud-based AI for operational evaluation makes the system unique in the field.
One part of the announcement that may interest the civil liberties crowd is the ability of any ‘public safety agency’ in Switzerland to hire out the drone network on a kind of pay-as-you-go ride-sharing basis. This theoretically means that Swiss security or enforcement agencies could rent a convenient local drone to conduct surveillance or targeting on a whim, which is sure to exercise the attention of those concerned with privacy and legal due process.
Nokia’s partner in Belgium, CitiMesh, has also made it clear the AI is going to be used not only to visually evaluate fire hazards and chemical spill dangers but also to check on crowd sizes and locate missing individuals, for instance by filtering out everyone in a live drone video feed wearing a red jacket. T2
he company eventually hopes to integrate the drone video feeds with static city-wide CCTV cameras to provide even greater coverage. We can see no potential for abuse there at all.
In the meantime, the new Nokia drone product is rapidly gaining customers across the world. Last month Westcon-Comstor, a global tech provider, announced that it would become an approved Nokia Drone Networks distributor in the EU, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
The technology also recently gained FCC certification in the U.S., so watch that space, as they say. And, let's hope it doesn't lead to a Terminator having to travel back through time.
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