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Hi everyone, and welcome back to Geek time. Hi Brad!

Hey, how's it going?

Today I thought I would like to propose a topic.

All right.

Lately I actually bought my Dad a gift, which is a drone无人机. So as I was doing that, I was thinking Brad definitely knows something about that.

I know a bit about drones.

Do you actually own a drone？

I don't own one. I have built the frame for one. And I was designing one at one point, but yeah, I haven't actually...

Not even on the same level of the talk that I was still buying one and you're designing one. OK, let's start from the very basic because in Chinese we call it无人机, so are we to understand that drones are just like mini helicopters without pilots?

It's not flying things. It's UAV or UGV they're unmanned, basically it’s the whole idea. But it can be…

UAV? remind me.

So unmanned aerial vehicle.

In the air?

So it's in the air, or unmanned ground vehicle which is a ground vehicle. So it can be something like the police using a, like small tank to go into for what you call it like a bomb disposal.

I suppose无人机it doesn’t have to be 飞机, it’s just a vehicle.

Right.

It also can be almost like a mini car, sort of thing.

Typically when it comes to like remote controlled cars, we don't necessarily call them drones nowadays, we just kind of refer to them as like remote control but that's where UAVs came from, like that. That's where the whole concept came from.

But I mean, nowadays when people hear drone, most people, most English speakers, would first of all, think of the thing that flies in the air.

That's typically when people think of it, they think of quadcopters or octocopters, just any of those types of things. That's the first thing that they think of.

Quad is... Quad means four.

Right.

Almost like a rectangle or like a square.

Right

And then you said the other one is?

Like octocopter or hexacopter. They can have more than four wingfold.

所以六边形的或者八边形的这种，Yeah, I’ve seen them. So they're like different design sort of, but I know it's gonna sound really stupid but I often think what is the difference between drones and those, you know, remote controlled helicopters or cars, kids play.

The main difference is like you have a distant remote control where you can control where it goes. You can kind of see where it is via your own sight, but like, when it becomes more of a drone elsewhere, you can control it and make it go much further away either via a camera or a screen where you can kind of know where it goes, and it can kind of control itself with a RC car or a remote control airplane. Once it loses signal, it'll drop or it will just stop going, whereas with like a drone or in modern day quadcopters, they will either return or they will land, They have like their own circuits, like they have, GPS and all these other things that will help them land on their own or return to the owner.

I see, it does sound a lot more advanced, but when were these drones first created? Let me guess, it's not just one person creating them, it's probably created for military uses.

Definitely, they were created for military use. Originally they were being created like pre-World War One, right?

Really?

That's like the earliest one. They were first coming up with remote controlled airplanes and things like that. It was very limited and what they could do，but they wanted to have a way where they could, you know, send in a plane without a pilot. And that would make the war very much easier, but of course it was very limited. It wasn't until like the 80s and 90s that what we kind of see it as like modern day drones really started to be developed.

Oh, so pre-World War One that those were more like the basic or rudimentary or the predecessor. 就是无人机的前身大概一战之前就出现了，that's really surprising to me. But I guess for military uses, they're just what? for spying on your enemies or do they actually launch attacks?

Oh yeah, like, drones are meant for surveillance and for more strategic strikes.

Strategic strikes, you mean specific targets.

Usually for individuals like leaders and opposing side or something like that or like a small group of people, you don't typically see them for larger strikes, but for more smaller like specialized strikes.

嗯有点像暗杀那种assassination maybe.

Kind of in that sense, yeah.

But you also see them being used by the police like you said earlier, when the police is trying to dispose of a bomb or trying to get rid of the bomb, they would probably send in a drone either ground based or in the air.

They can use it for those types of things, but they can also use them to follow like, criminals who are driving away. Typically when you follow a driver at very high speed, they go faster and so it creates unsafe conditions for the people around them. So, rather than having a police officer follow them directly, they'll use like drones and these types of things to follow them from a distance. When you have a helicopter, usually helicopter is very loud and big and you can see it，but a drone is usually a bit smaller and it's more difficult to see. And so they can kind of follow and it's not something that's widely used, and some States they don't allow this at all, but you can use this in some places and maybe use it in bigger cities sometimes.

But I think it does sound like a good idea because then this will prevent police officers from basically subjecting themselves to, like you said, unsafe situations. But apart from military and police, is drone technology used in any other like actual industries?

It's used in a lot of different industries. Some of the more common industries you're seeing now are like delivery and real estate.

Yes, doesn't Amazon have their own drones for delivery?

They are not using them widely yet, but they are currently developing a system and they do use it for a very small amount of deliveries.

And you said real estate.

Yeah, like they have a lot of photographers going in and taking pictures, but for like modern day when you're getting like a very expensive property, you wanna have like a big picture of the area, especially if you have like something in the countryside with a lot of land, you want to get like a good view or video of the area around it, and it kind of makes people like want to buy the property even more.

有点像那种豪宅的360度空中俯视图。 OK, did not know that, so they use drones in real estate. And on top of that, of course, I know they are used in movies not just in the traditional media but also in social media with a lot of vloggers, people shooting their own videos.

Yeah, like when you think about having like aerial footage for a movie, in the past, there was almost always helicopters and helicopters are really expensive like, thousands of dollars for an hour, whereas modern day you can get like a drone that costs a few thousand dollars and you can get a like 4 to 8K camera that you can get connected to the drone and get really great footage for just a few thousand dollars for the device, which is, yeah.

Can you actually, live stream it?

You can live stream them to some degree. It's a little bit tricky because of the distance away that you have to be from the drone when you do stream video. It can be done with like lower quality video feeds. But you can do it if you are close enough to the drone, so it is possible.

所以一定程度的直播也是可以的。I've seen those pictures or videos that my parents took with their new drone. It is amazing. I mean, and to think that is something that used to... when I was growing up, if you would tell me that I could use this, I mean, I knew the technology was there, but I didn't think it was for just ordinary people like me to use. I would think you definitely gotta have a lot of money or you gotta be in government or big big companies to use it. So are you saying that there is like basically drones are becoming more and more affordable for people？

You can get a drone that has a 4K camera on it for about the same prices. Professional DSLR, it was like maybe a little bit more about, but it's about the same prices essentially, they're not very much more.

So maybe in the future, we can do some of our shows with a drone.

Possibility, maybe we can have a few strikes on the way.

Don't joke about that. All right, this wraps up our basic episode about drones. In the advanced episode, we're gonna explore more on the topic and maybe talk about more of the areas where drones can be used. Thank you Brad for coming to show.

No problem, have a good day.

We will see you next time, bye bye.