5 surprising drone uses (besides pizza delivery)

We all know drones can deliver death on the battlefield, but might they also soon be delivering hot pizzas to your door? While the "DomiCopter," the brainchild of a British Domino's pizza franchise, delivered a pair of hot pies in a YouTube video promotion that caught a lot of attention this week, such service won't be available anytime soon.

In the United States, it would be downright illegal.

"It flew beyond the operator's visual line of sight, and while you'd have to do that for a delivery operation, that is something that the FAA won't even consider allowing because of security and safety concerns," said Ben Gielow, a spokesman for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, referring to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Still, plenty of surprising civilian uses have emerged for the unmanned aerial system (UAS) technology, which is best known for military and intelligence applications like aerial surveillance and targeted assassinations, Kazinform cites National Geographic.

Today, only government agencies, some public universities, and a handful of private companies hold the few hundred existing FAA permits to fly private drones. But the Federal Aviation Administration is set to further open skies to commercial drones by 2015 and expects to see perhaps 7,500 in the air by 2020-most of which will likely be small machines resembling model airplanes.

What will all those drones be doing? Here are five civilian areas in which they've already excelled:

1. Hurricane hunting

Drones can charge into the heart of a storm without risking human life and limb. That's one reason NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Northrop Grumman teamed up on a three-year, $30-million experiment to use long-range Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to spy on storms as they evolve.

The program's Global Hawk drones can stay aloft for 30 hours and fly 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers) with their 116-foot (35-meter) wingspans. That lets them reach and stay in stormy areas that manned planes can't, performing valuable surveillance.

Scott Braun, director of NASA's Global Hawk mission, used this analogy in an interview with National Geographic last year: "If you drove by a drug dealer's house, you wouldn't catch him; but if you stood there all day, you might."

Braun and team have tapped unmanned air power to track tropical storm data through a storm's long evolution, in hopes of improving prediction powers. "If we can improve forecasts," Braun said, "we can save money and lives."

A team at the University of Florida, meanwhile, is tackling the same task with a different method, employing a swarm of six-inch-long drones that are launched with a laptop, use little power, and can be carried by wind water current-even underwater-to ride through a massive storm by the hundreds, collecting data.

Their reports on temperature, pressure, humidity, and location could help scientists understand the forces of wind and water inside hurricanes by going with the flow the way humans never could.

"Our vehicles don't fight the hurricane; we use the hurricane to take us places," said the University of Florida's Kamran Mohseni, who invented the little drones.

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