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Droning For Sharks
FreedomFirstThenPeac writes: Apparently Orange County (specifically, Seal Beach area) has found that drones are useful for finding hazards at the beach, the story has a nice drone-shot overhead of a small shark (scale is hard to tell). They also report that it is easy to spot rip tides. The question of the day, how long till someone links imaging processing software with the guidance system so they can get the drones to hover over, and follow along, as sharks patrol off shore? Just another day at the beach, see the shoal of nerds schooling along with their drone controls? They are the ones who are missing all the swimsuit-enhanced normals in the area.
Sure, the salt will destroy them.
Just buy new ones when they go wonky. DJI Phantoms are about a kilobuck. If they last 2 weeks, that's only 25k/year, which isn't much compared to the salary of the lifeguard looking at the controller. And I'll bet if you committed to buy 25 of them a year, you'd get them cheaper.
The real issue is the cost of the operator.