Home Security System Employs Autonomous Drone

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Private homes can now have autonomous aerial security systems. The system, of Sunflower labs, claims innovation in the field of home security.  The system uses a series of motion and vibration sensors in conjunction with an autonomous drone to monitor all activity in the perimeter of the house.   

“We have a core belief that a lot of value is hidden not just in the vision spectrum, but the motion and vibration spectrum,” says Alex Pachikov, Sunflower Labs CEO, according to theverge.com.  

The drone can be launched via a smartphone application. The system involves the Sunflowers, the Bee and the Hive. The Sunflowers are small bulbs filled with sensors disguised as garden lights. “The sensors can detect people, pets, and cars. Vibration sensors detect footsteps, car engines… even if you’re running a coffee maker”, Pachikov said.  

The Sunflowers are placed around the home to help create a map and triangulate people and other objects within the space.

The Bee is the autonomous drone and its base station is the Hive.

The whole system works together by letting the Bee leave its station and then fly around the home capturing video by using the Sunflowers to perform path planning. It avoids obstacles on the way by relying on its built-in cameras and sensors. When it’s ready to land, you press a button on the Sunflower mobile app, and the drone docks itself into the funnel-shaped landing zone of the base station, which also doubles as a charger.

In practice, the Sunflower system would alert a homeowner of something unexpected moving around the house, thanks to the ground sensors. They would then manually choose whether to deploy the drone, which would then stream a live 1080p video feed to your phone or tablet. Once the drone is docked again, the video is saved to the cloud.

The company says it’s designing the system to be deployable by both homeowners and third-party monitoring services in the event that you’re asleep or away from home and not monitoring your phone when the activity occurs.

“The security industry is just absolutely ripe for disruption. They haven’t done anything particularly new in 30 years. It’s door and window sensors, and CCTV cameras.” Instead of having to go back and see what went wrong after an intruder has already broken in, or needing to have someone monitor the system all of the time, Pachikov says he “wants to know what’s happening around my property before it’s at my door.” For instance, if someone is scoping out the house to see whether it could be a viable target at some later date.