UAV Ordered Via the Smartphone will Light the Street

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Insurance provider Direct Line’s new Fleetlights service intends to bring peace of mind to anyone walking, running, or driving at night by illuminating their paths with LED flashlights.

Fleetlights consists of two types of drones that work together –  15 quadcopters with a maximum speed of 33 miles per hour armed with one flashlight which will fly along five six-engine hexacopters that can travel up to 60 miles per hour while carrying three lights.

Direct Line marketing director Mark Evans told inverse.com that Fleetlights is part of an attempt to revolutionize insurance: “The business of insurance will stop being about restitution and will start being about prevention”. The Fleetlights project was born from that belief and a simple statistic: There’s a 42% increase in deaths and injuries during the darker months.

Another study found that good Lamps Are the Best Police: Darkness Increases Dishonesty and Self-Interested Behavior. That’s where Fleetlights comes in. A prototype of the service allows people to summon the drones with a smartphone app. The quad- and hexacopters then use military technologies to find their location within a few millimeters, communicate via mesh networking, and use dynamic waypoints to respond to whatever they’re supposed to be following. The result is a system where drones can stay in formation while ensuring that their subject remains illuminated.

Fleetlights drones were tested in August in a scripted demo. Although the current phase isn’t much more than a prototype, Direct Line would eventually like to improve Fleetlights with advanced collision detecting, which could remove the need for waypoint mapping, and install hydrogen power units instead of lithium-based batteries. The company has made the technology open source, which means other developers can use its designs for themselves or contribute to the platform. This isn’t just a concept, Evans said that it’s the first of Direct Line’s efforts to use technology to bring the insurance industry back to its roots.

Evans explained that the product won’t make its commercial debut any time soon. The United Kingdom, much like the United States, is still trying to figure out how to regulate drones. The tech is also moving so quickly that Direct Line hasn’t even attempted to figure out how much a service like Fleetlights might cost.