Artificial Intelligence to Help Regulate Drones Traffic

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The London-based big data startup Flock is building a platform for performing real-time quantified risk analysis of drone flights, including by applying AI (artificial intelligence) to tracking data sourced from urban environments. Currently it’s focusing its efforts on the U.K. market.

According to TechCrunch, the company is licensing data pertaining to the position of buildings, people and cars in urban environments, as well as weather conditions, and feeding that into its risk assessment platform. Idea being for its software to analyze a planned drone flight in real-time and perform a “cost/benefit” analysis — to help insurers set premiums or drone operators decide whether or not to undertake a given flight.

In the future the company intneds to apply machine learning algorithms to the urban data it’s getting in order to generate “real-time risk reduction” for drone operators via predictive assessments for drone flight scheduling — which it reckons could be used to power fully autonomous drone flights zipping along risk-minimized routes.

“The idea is to have a robust trend analysis built in to the system so we can analyze historic data, and then build up a really good understanding of how cities move generally, how cities breathe, and how populations and traffic conditions change over time,” says Ed Leon Klinger, CEO.

“Therefore we can calculate the best route to take and the exact time to go, which is most efficient — both for internal logistics purposes and for external risk assessment purposes.

So we’ll be using machine learning to formulate the predictions that we need that allows drones to intelligently navigate through cities and also be intelligently scheduled.”