Joel GoldbergCounting penguins is tough work: On Antarctica’s Cape Crozier, it takes scientists two full days to map the location of 300,000 nesting pairs of Adélie penguins, using helicopters and hand-flown drones.
Meanwhile, brutal winds, freezing rain, and snow limit the flight windows for these laborious surveys.Now, scientists have cut that time to just 3 hours by equipping their drones with a new flight path algorithm.
Previously, scientists piloted single drones back and forth over swaths of land, similar to the way you might mow a lawn or shave a beard.
But POPCORN, as the new algorithm is called, automatically sets the course for multiple drone to pass over the same area in just a fraction of the time, while avoiding collisions and.