ASKED to look into the future of drones, CSIRO scientist Jonanthon Roberts envisages a parcel delivery revolution.
Say you're on a farm and have just completed a broadband-enabled medical consultation with your doctor.
Instead of having to drive to town to pick up your prescription, Dr Roberts suggests that within a few hours a drone aircraft flies over and parachutes a canister containing your medications down near your house.
The same idea could apply to machinery parts, or any other urgently-needed items.
"If we're thinking about real blue-sky stuff, it could also work in reverse: a drone lands near your house, you put a parcel in a compartment, push a button, and the drone flies back to its destination," Dr Roberts said.
The technology to realise this futuristic vision is being developed at an extraordinary rate.
CSIRO's Autonomous Systems Laboratory, of which Dr Roberts is research director, has built a drone helicopter that without any human input can find its way through and around trees until it "recognises" its target, a windmill, 1.5 km from its starting point.
The laboratory is currently working on automation that will allow a fully automated drone to fly over rainforest in mountainous terrain, looking for weeds.
When complete, the project will be released for commercialisation, further enriching the drone automation ecosystem.
The future capabilities of drones will be defined by how much on-board computing they can do.
That's already considerable, as shown by Outback Rescue Challenge, a competition co-founded by Dr Roberts in which drone enthusiasts use their machines to search an area of 1.5km by 3km for a lost bushwalker - actually a dummy named Outback Joe.
The Challenge was won last year by amateur group Canberra UAV.
Chris Gough, a software developer and member of the group, said their fixed wing drone made 20,000 images a minute of the ground it was flying over. The images were electronically scanned on the drone's computers, and a few promising images identified and streamed back to the operators on the ground.
Mr Gough believed the win was important not just because it showed drone capability, but because it demonstrated that in civilian applications, these machines can play a positive role in society.
"Otherwise everyone's view of UAVs is going to be set by the military and surveillance industries," Mr Gough said.
