Bird Drone : Neighborhood Security Concept

Imagine ending crime in your neighborhood with video evidence; theft, home invasions, mail box break in's, personal assaults or any other crime that takes place out in the open, where the Birds can see. Enter the Drone Bird Concept. 
A drone bird looks like a bird, it has a body (composite), eyes (cameras), wings (flight, solar power), two legs (DC input) and feet that can grasp things (robotic hands).

The drone bird collects energy though its feet, each leg the plus or minus of a DC input pad that the drone bird can land on with its autopilot, machine vision, and the best of all RC airplane and drone tech. The thin film solar energy collector system covers the top of the body and top of the wings, so the bird can collect energy when perched or in flight from bright cloudy skies, direct sun, artificial lighting like street lights, or any other source of light that the optimized triple junction high efficiency thin film solar wing energy collection system can capture. Power from the solar system can be used to power the Drone Birds electronics direct, can be used to charge the energy storage battery system, or can be used to run the electronics and charge the battery if enough light energy is being captured to fully maximize the solar collections systems output.

For long duration missions of more than 20 min flight time, the bird can pick up an energy package with its feet, the two handles of the package forming the plus and minus of the packages energy output. The fuel cell energy and or battery energy packages can be placed at pickup zones where the bird can drop off a spent one for recharging and pick up a freshly charged one to keep going. A special carbon fiber hydrogen fuel cell bundle that can be refilled can give the drone bird up to two hours of sustained flight. The battery module can be hot swapped from the birds tail section, composed of next generation Lithium Sulfur rechargeable technology. The battery energy packages are made of 18650's, are low cost, and can be purchased in bulb bundles. The energy packages also have solar power that unfolds from the top like the pedals to a flower on a polymer flexible rugged gimbal mount that allows for solar tracking, boosting the solar collection by more than 30%. At night the solar panels are retracted to protect the panels from storm systems, dust, or other debris or impact hazards at night. If a drone bird approaches, an ad-hoc mesh network is instantly formed between the bird and the package, so the package can pull in its solar panels so the bird can pick it up.

When the bird is at home, on your roof, it connects to your wifi network and uploads any unusual sightings, video sequences, vehicle plate scans, facial image captures, or other information it saw that might be related to crime, collecting high precision evidence both still images and video for the police.

Using an AI engine developed between Intel and Google, the drone Bird has a library of adaptive pattern recognition processes in its machine vision. The sapphire front lenses of the birds eyes cover an adaptive wide dynamic range stereo camera system with an addition forward looking infrared camera located inside the drone birds mouth, it keeps its mouth closed to protect the rare material front lens of the FLIR camera. The drone is able to zoom one eye in while recording a separate stream in wide angle from its other eye. It can also see and record in 3D, both in wide and zoomed in perspectives. The bird will fly in closer to its target, and record for bursts of up to 240FPS to collect in flight flyby high resolution captures. 

The drone bird has an adaptive 4TB solid state hard-drive based on Intel's low cost higher performance X-point memory. It minimizes the creation of large data by using intelligent motion tracking to only record video of movement, and advanced filtering and data rejection algorithms to not record irrelevant or repeated data of no safety or security value. Using a statistics ranking system with cloud support based on IBM's Watson, Amazon's Alexa, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana. The drone Birds natural voice control can understand and speak any known indexed language, but it will operate on a primary language based on the region it is placed in to limit the on board data footprint and network data requirements. In regions like Quebec Canada, where French and English are spoken, the Drone Bird will load both languages. Similarly, if crime in a given district that speaks english is being committed primary by people who speak another langue, the Drone Bird will use phonic detection and load up the languages of the bad guys. It will archive any words or phrases it did not understand, for cloud assisted computation and analysis when the drone bird returns home to upload its findings to the cloud over your home wifi connect, again the focus is only minimizing the use of its 5G network data service, to maximize signal fidelity during cloud uploads. The entire OS and all support files, control files, recordings, video, sound, images, are backed up to the cloud. If the drone bird is catastrophically damaged, simply replacing the drone with a new one will automatically restore it to its previous state, similar to a Chrome Book. 

The Bird Drone is waterproof, impact resistant, dust proof, freeze proof, and is able to be field serviced without any special tools. Anyone with two hands can break one down into its components from services or spares. On the unlimited subscription, a full set of spares are supplied, along with automatic replenishment of any parts the break down, the bird will automatically send order requests if the system detects a malfunctioning or poorly function component or sub-system. 

The is an RC mode that can be unlocked for toy functionally, when you can use your wireless oculus rift to soard- google Street View style in 3D, using long range wifi-AD, the drone bird can down load its video over large distances with a comparable wireless router. Optional 4G LTE support enables it to function over wireless smartphone service networks like those offered by AT&T and Verizon. 

Current state of the art drones like the DJI phantom 3 cost about $4000. Meg and I imagine a range of different birds like a small inexpensive lower resolution Finch sized model for everyone, a larger more capable Crow model, and Duel 4K video Owl with the best in class image quality, flight duration, and performance. We image a price of $399 for the Finch, $999 for the crow, and $3999 for the Owl. The pricing, sizing and performance categories are modeled after the current drone offering from DJI, Aerovironment, Boeing and Qinetiq, but at prices that are actually affordable for working people. 

To get the most out of the drone, monthly subscriptions ranging from a basic motion sensing security camera with cloud backup, and time-lapse review, to full featured packages of unlimited online storage, with professional security expert video review support, ongoing software updates that improve the birds AI, and subscription based hardware upgrades. Mostly subscriptions range from $10 for the basic security camera, to $399 for the unlimited bundle. 

This bird drone and its online services is a fictional creation that I dreamed up while walking with Meg into a crow community area about 2 miles away from our home. I had long been toying with the idea of connected home security cameras like the Drop Cam, and the benefits of Drone video capturing technology, the computer systems inside our Fitbits, and cells phones, and the advances being made in machine learning, natural speech processing, cloud computing, mobil networks, and subscription based service and support offerings spanning the gamut of sectors today. 

If anyone is interesting in partnering to make this Bird Drone become a reality, 

give me a jingle at Drumstick@msn.com