Drone Tech Start-Up to Take on UK Skies With Intelligent UAVs

There were 26 attempts to smuggle drugs, cell phones and other illegal items into prisons in England and Wales during 2015, making drones a growing concern for prison officials. Drones can be bought for around US$1,500 which can carry weights of up to 1.5 kg.

​In the same year, there were 30 confirmed drone sightings on UK flight paths, with one coming within 20 meters of a passenger airplane as it flew over the Houses of Parliament in London pulling the safety and efficiency of drones in UK skies into sharp focus.

It's since emerged that a London based start-up firm is working on technology to make the skies safer. Flock, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze city data to assess the risks of flying a drone in an urban environment.

​Flock inputs data about building positions, people, cars and weather conditions into a specific risk assessment platform which then calculates whether it is safe to fly or not.

​"The idea is to have a robust trend analysis built in to the system so we can analyze historic data on all the data sources that we collect over a given period of time, and then build up a really good understanding of how cities move generally, how cities breath, and how populations and traffic conditions change over time," Ed Leon Klinger, CEO and founder of Flock, told TechCrunch.

Flock hopes to utilize AI algorithms to gather airspace data to provide the best route with minimal risk for drones to fly, taking into consideration all scheduled flights at city airports

"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," Klinger said.

​"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." Flock will focus on real-time analytics of urban data to determine the safety of airspace.