The room is brightly lit and sterile, with banks of monitors displaying live footage from the drones flying overhead. There’s a large table in the center of the room, where a team of operators sit monitoring the drones’ movements. “We’re getting reports that there’s a group of people in front of the building,” one operator says, looking at a screen. “We need to take them out.” The operators quickly decide what to do: One sends out a drone to take out the people in front of the building, while another orders more drones to fly over and protect the ones already in place. Within minutes, they’ve successfully taken out their target and saved the building from destruction. This is just one example of how drone technology is being used today by law enforcement agencies all over the world to protect people and property. Drones have revolutionized modern policing by allowing officers to cover vast areas quickly and efficiently, without putting anyone at risk. ..
If you’ve ever wanted to know what goes on inside a delivery drone command center, or haven’t at all, Wing is giving a look behind the scenes and a day in the life of a commercial drone operator. Perhaps you’re picturing someone in Top Gun sunglasses, an orange vest, and waving batons as drones lift off all around them and onlookers mutter, “Godspeed.”
But it’s more like a desk with multiple screens featuring a rudimentary flight simulator, which doesn’t let you fly. At its newest facility in Dallas-Fort Worth metro area (where it operates deliveries for Walgreens, among others), the pilots oversee multiple simultaneous flights across entire service areas in Texas, Virginia, and as far as Australia.
Much of the process is automated and there’s actually very little human interaction with the drones, except the part when they’re loaded up. When an order comes in, a partner employee attaches the payload at the “nest,” which is where the drones sit, charge, and shoot the breeze while they wait for their orders (a Pixar film about this seems inevitable).
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Once that payload is attached (aluminum foil or condoms or whatever the person ordered), the flight navigation system plans its own routes, and then the drone sets off, travelling to a destination in about a four to six mile radius.
Back at the command center they have a view of the nest as the drones lift off, but they’re not flying them with joysticks or anything (“Pull up!”), and not seeing a live feed through their onboard cameras that feels like flying.
Instead, the pilots are watching little drone icons as they complete the deliveries on a GPS map, keeping abreast of inclement weather, and making sure the drones don’t slam into each other like two waiters at a busy restaurant.
While hands-on intervention is rare, a ground support team is available to be dispatched to the drone’s location, in case it needs repositioning on a charging pad or tries to go to space.
The whole process is a more complicated version of when you’re watching your pizza move closer to your house in a delivery app pizza tracker. But in that case, lives are clearly at stake.
Source: Wing
