The Invisible Infrastructure in the Sky | Adam Bry | TED

My guess is, for many of you, [a] drone is a scary concept. It might evoke images of weapons in Ukraine, in the skies over the Middle East, where these things are creating damage and devastation at a massive scale. Ukrainians reported last month [that] 96 percent of the casualties they inflicted on Russian forces were done via drone strikes. Now this is a terrifying new reality on the battlefield. It's also one that we can't afford to ignore in the West. But I want to use my time today to talk about an entirely different kind of drone use, much closer to home, that's already having life-saving impact. And I think the best way to understand it is just to show it to you. So I'm going to demonstrate the robotics technology live here on stage, sort of. So we are over here in Vancouver.

Hi, TED. But I am connected to a drone in Tokyo. I’m going to click the launch button -- this is all live -- and a real drone is going to launch itself on the other side of the Pacific, and I can just control it right here from my laptop. So it's a little bit like playing a video game. But I can fly around, I can look and see whatever I want to see. So the thing that allowed me to do this is called a dock. So this is the dock here. It looks like kind of an intergalactic grill. (Laughter) So it's got a bunch of advanced technology in it, but it turns the drone into a fully autonomous device. It can be flown remotely. I don't need a person on scene, and it turns the drone into a software-defined thing. So I can fly it here, and the software will keep me safe. So I can just cruise under this awning -- or over -- its choice.

(Laughter) I can tap on an object that I might be interested in. Now the drone is flying itself. It's autonomously tracking that car. This is hands-off -- it’s a very powerful capability. So I'm going to stop this now and initiate an autonomous patrol of the area. So that's cool, but why does it actually matter? Well I'm going to share with you a couple of stories. The Oklahoma City Police Department has placed dock drones all over their city, and they’re using them to respond to emergencies. So in this instance, a train operator called 911 in a panic, afraid that he might have hit something or someone on the tracks. Now this is very difficult to access. On the ground, this is probably an hour search, but the drone got there in seconds. It was able to find that, unfortunately, there was somebody on the tracks, but because of the drone, they knew exactly where he was. They were able to guide in first responders, and they saved this guy's life.

Another example. (Applause) This is from San Francisco. Very different application but same concept. Responding to a 911 incident. Here, there's a stolen vehicle. So they're able to follow the stolen vehicle from the air. They know exactly where he is. They know what he's doing. I don’t know about you -- when I steal a car, I like to steal a license plate to go along with it. So SFPD knew that this happened, but they never actually caught anybody in the act. With the drone, they're able to get this asymmetric advantage. So now he's got stolen plates. He’s going to put the plates on his vehicle. [He] conveniently holds it up so we can read it from the air. (Laughter) Any guesses as to what's happening now? Window tint. He’s got a stolen vehicle, stolen plates, [and] he’s tinting the windows. So this is the beginning of a crime spree. He's probably going to go off and steal a bunch more stuff, but the cops know exactly where he is, they know exactly what he's doing, so they roll a plainclothes unit out, roll spike strips -- he’s got flat tires, he can’t go very far -- [and] they take him into custody.

So this is safer for everybody involved. It’s certainly safer for the community [and] also safer for the officers. Honestly, it's even safer for the suspect because they know exactly where he is and what he's doing. Since SFPD has implemented this technology, they’ve seen a 30 percent drop in crime, a 40 percent drop in auto theft -- I can’t say that I blame the auto thieves. I probably wouldn't want to steal a car either. And this concept of drone as first responder is taking off across the country. So it started with a few agencies. Hundreds of agencies are now using it. By the end of this year, it'll be thousands. And right now, about five percent of the US population lives within a two-minute flight of a Skydio drone to respond to an emergency. But there are 240 million 911 calls every year in the US. And we're building towards a future where the default expectation for every emergency is that a drone shows up in a few seconds to provide targeted information [and] get better outcomes for everybody. That's one example. I’m going to show you a different category of use, though.

We have energy utility customers that are installing these in their substations. So this is American Electric Power in Ohio. They've got a great pioneering program. They have the dock in the substation. They can use it to perform both proactive and reactive inspections. And on one of those flights, they spotted this. This is a distribution pole with signs of a short and a fire that they wouldn't have caught any other way. So thanks to the drone footage, they knew exactly where it was. They went in, they repaired it. Why does this matter? Well some of the most devastating fires that we’ve had in the US have been the result of energy utility faults -- where something breaks, something goes wrong, there's a short, it starts a fire. Drones enable us to have a complete digital picture of the grid to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And if it does happen, we can know about it sooner and faster and mitigate the response. So flying cameras all over the place to get better information is super impactful. But the same kind of concept applies to drone delivery. So companies like Zipline and Wing are using dock drones to make it safer and faster to get a burrito delivered to your doorstep.

(Laughter) So there is a mountain of technology under the hood that makes this stuff work. Drones are deceptively small, but they're actually on par with self-driving cars and rocket ships in terms of the technical complexity it takes to make them work. There's vibration and thermals and aerodynamics, and the hardest part is making all this stuff work reliably when and where you need it. But the key enabling technology is actually eyesight -- giving drones the same ability that people have to look out and see the world. Our drones have very powerful computers built in that parallel our brains. They've got deep neural networks that parallel our biological neural networks. And the output is very similar to how humans see the world. They know where things are. They know what they are, and they can use all of that information to make intelligent decisions. So you might have noticed that I left a drone flying in Japan. We should go ahead and check in on that. This drone is performing an autonomous inspection. So this is a water tower that's in the area. I’m going to somewhat rudely interrupt it here.

I click stop. I click return and land and dock. So it will now go back up [and] autonomously find its way back to the dock. Dock opens up. It uses vision and AI to detect its landing spot, and it will come in and do an automated landing. So the dock, in some ways, turns the drone into something like a cloud server, where these things can be running autonomously, continuously in the background and doing useful work on our behalf. So what did we actually accomplish with this mission? On an autonomous patrol like this, we can inspect the infrastructure, we can look for intruders -- looks like we might have caught somebody here -- and generally have a complete digital picture of everything that's happening. In the 20th century, we built transportation infrastructure. We built power infrastructure. We built communication infrastructure. And I think drones have the potential to fundamentally advance and transform how we operate all of this infrastructure. But I actually think infrastructure is a pretty good way to describe what the drones themselves are becoming.

These things are dynamic, they’re intelligent, and they can run in the background, doing useful work for us constantly, 24/7. This is a future that we're incredibly excited to build at Skydio. Thank you. (Applause) Bilawal Sidhu: Hey, I'm Bilawal, the tech curator for TED 2026. Hopefully you enjoyed that conversation. Look, drones can be scary -- we see them on the battlefields of Ukraine. We also see them as toys and tools of entertainment. But there’s actually a very useful function for this technology: to go where people can’t, or go faster to a place before people get there. And that's this whole idea about drone as first responder and drone as like, essentially infrastructure monitoring. We had these crazy fires in LA that could have been prevented if we had drones that were surveying power lines and infrastructure that clearly, you know, caused that blaze. But again, like most things, this technology is very dual-use. And that's why we want to have these conversations. You ought to know about what the technology is capable of, how it’s being used in every facet of society, so we can have the discussion about what we want to do with it.

I hope you enjoyed.