When we write about drone stories from the United Kingdom, they often have a slightly depressing air to them as we relate tales of unverified air proximity reports closing airports or bungled official investigations that would make the Keystone Kops look like competent professionals.
But here’s a drone story from this rainswept isle sure to put a smile on the face of multirotor enthusiasts worldwide, as Denmead Drone Search And Rescue, an organisation who locate missing pets using drones, enticed lost dog Millie from a soon-to-be-engulfed tidal mudflat by the simple expedient of dangling a sausage from a drone for the mutt to follow (Facebook).
Lest you believe that Hackaday have lost their marbles and this isn’t worthy of our normal high standards, let us remind you that this is not our first flying sausage story. Behind the cute-puppy and flying meat product jokes though, there’s a serious side. Drones have received such a bad press over recent years that a good news story concerning them is rare indeed, and this one has garnered significant coverage in the general media. Maybe it’s too late to reverse some of the reputational damage from the Gatwick fiasco, but at this point any such coverage is good news.
For anyone wondering what lies behind this, let us take you back to Christmas 2018.
this is how the finished off all the homer clones
Tangentially related topic: That Guardian link has a horrible cookie policy. They send you about 30 3rd party cookies as “essential and can’t be refused.” Stuff like Facebook, Amazon, Soundcloud, etc. So I get that they’re required to tell you and let you choose which ones you want as long as they’re not essential, but the standard for essential seems to include anything they want.
I usually open these kinds of links in a new private window (just a right click away) then accept everything. This way I don’t waste time unchecking manually the 300 checkboxes for every sub-variation of tracker they want to use, and even the “mandatory” ones are isolated and lost at the end of the session. Win-win.
use firefox and the noscript extension. It allows you to choose which scripts to block and allow. You only need a few scripts active to get the content.
I never get drone sausages. :(
Do you spend much time on soon-to-be-engulfed tidal mudflat. If not that is probably why. Obviously if you did you would have to get to the sausage before the dog did.
And there’s always our (UK) stupid laws to circumvent. ““It was a crazy idea,” said Chris Taylor, the chair of the Denmead Drone Search and Rescue team. But they pressed ahead and after checking Civil Aviation Authority regulations, and the MTOW [maximum takeoff weight] of their machines, the rescuers calculated they could attach a single sausage to a drone.”
Take your Daily Mail hat off – any organisation flying a drone would need to be aware of CAA regs, or local equivalent, and checking the MTOW seems only sensible before loading up an expensive drone only to risk it crashing into mudflats and making the problem worse.