Cities and Drones: What Cities Need to Know about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

NLC's municipal guide, Cities and Drones, is designed to serve as a primer on drones for local officials, providing insight into the recently released federal rules relating to drone operation, as well as offering suggestions for how local governments can craft their own drone ordinances to encourage innovation while also protecting their cities.Drones have the potential to revolutionize many industries and city services, particularly as their technology advances. There are many applications for drones within the public sector at the local and state level. Drones can be used for law enforcement and firefighting, as rural ambulances, and for inspections, environmental monitoring, and disaster management. Any commercial arena that involves outdoor photography or visual inspection will likely be experimenting with drones in the near future, as will retailers who want to speed up package delivery.However, drones also present challenges. There are some safety issues, for instance, when operators fly their drones over people or near planes. City residents often have privacy concerns when any small device hovering nearby could potentially be taking photos or video. The FAA's final rule on drones left some opportunity for city governments to legislate on this issue. Rather than ban them outright, city officials should consider how this new technology might serve residents or enhance city services

Usage and acceptance of drone technology in healthcare : exploring patients and physicians perspective

Modern technologies such as virtual reality, robots or drones are getting more and more important for organizations. Accordingly, the question arises in which industries these technologies can make a difference. This paper examines the use of drones in Swiss hospitals. A literature review is conducted outlining the most relevant flied of application for drone usage in healthcare. These use cases are then qualitatively rated by employees and patients of hospitals from different regions in Switzerland. Among others, the analysis revealed that employees and patients have strong concerns about drone usage in the hospital environment in the case drones provide diagnosis capabilities, but show less doubts if drones are used for delivery processes

Drones and the Fourth Amendment: Redefining Expectations of Privacy

Drones have gained notoriety as a weapon against foreign terrorist targets; yet, they have also recently made headlines as an instrument for domestic surveillance. With their sophisticated capabilities and continuously decreasing costs, it is not surprising that drones have attracted numerous consumers—most notably, law enforcement. Courts will likely soon have to decipher the limits on the government’s use of drones under the Fourth Amendment. But it is unclear where, or even whether, drones would fall under the current jurisprudence. Because of their diverse and sophisticated designs and capabilities, drones might be able to maneuver through the Fourth Amendment’s doctrinal loopholes. This Note advocates analyzing drones under an adapted approach to the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test in Katz v. United States. Courts should focus more on the test’s oft-neglected first prong—whether a person exhibited a subjective expectation of privacy—and analyze what information falls within the scope of that expectation, excluding information knowingly exposed to the plain view of the public. This analysis also considers instances when, although a subjective expectation exists, it may be impossible or implausible to reasonably exhibit that expectation, a dilemma especially relevant to an analysis of drones. Courts that adopt the recommended analysis would have a coherent and comprehensible approach to factually dynamic cases challenging the constitutionality of drone surveillance. Until then, the constitutional uncertainties of these cases will likely linger

The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing : Hearing Before the S. Judiciary Subcomm. on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, 113th Cong., April 23, 2013 (Statement by Professor Rosa Brooks, Geo. U. L. Center)

Mr. Chairman, the mere mention of drones tends to arouse strong emotional reactions on both sides of the political spectrum, and last week\u27s tragic events in Boston have raised the temperature still further. Some demonize drones, denouncing them for causing civilian deaths or enabling long-distance, video game-like killing, even as they ignore the fact that the same (or worse) could equally be said of many other weapons delivery systems. Others glorify drones, viewing them as a low- or no-cost way to take out terrorists wherever they may be found, with little regard for broader questions of strategy or the rule of law

Smart Rescue Drones to Find Snowslide Victims

In the approach of using autonomous robots to find victims on risk zones, there are specific ones that can reach the victims faster, the Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), better known as Drones. For this to happen, artificial intelligence algorithms were designed to teach them to search for the victims faster. On this paper, a simulation of three drones flying on different environments was made based on a Hidden Markov Models with KNN classifier as an artificial intelligence approach for the learning. The results revealed that for some environments, based on memory to store the paths and the classification of the objects, different hardware settings for the drones can be needed