Over the past couple of months, two home security manufacturers announced plans to launch drone based machine learning home surveillance systems. The first announcement came in November of 2016 by new startup Sunflower Labs and the next announcement came by Alarm.com at CES 2017. How will these systems work? Let’s explore.
Sunflower Labs
Sunflower Labs, with headquarters in Silicon Valley and Zurich, Switzerland, designed a surveillance system that detects possible threats and investigates them with a drone.
The Sunflower Home Awareness System relies on the drone and a handful of in-ground smart lights to watch over your house. It detects motion, vibration and sound. By analyzing this data, the system can distinguish between a human, a car and animals. To do so, it uses artificial intelligence to identify the disturbance and determine if it’s potentially dangerous. For example, trusted visitors such as mail delivery persons will be recognized by how they approach the home and how long they stand at the front door.
The drone is deployed from an outdoor weatherproof “hive” — complete with retractable door — to do a spot of investigating. Users don’t need to possess pilot skills, since the drone will fly itself to wherever the suspicious activity has been detected. Nor do they have to worry about the time of day, since the drone can use its high-res camera with infrared light for night vision during times when the sun is down. The drone streams video to your smartphone, so you can see and decide if your home is at risk or not.
Sunflower Labs, which is now accepting participant applications, will start beta tests in mid-2017. The startup sees itself as a complement to traditional alarms.
Alarm.com
Another company announcing plans for a drone surveillance and machine learning sysetm is Alarm.com. They officially made an announcement for plans to develop autonomous, video-enabled drone applications to extend the capabilities of smart home and business security systems at CES 2017.
The drones will use Alarm.com’s new multi-sensor awareness and property intelligence, dubbed Insights Engine, together with the Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight drone platform, to investigate unexpected activity.
The company’s new Insights Engine learning capability applies machine-learning algorithms to the growing data set generated by devices and sensors in a connected property. By recognizing complex activity patterns and detecting anomalies, the system can proactively respond to events on behalf of the user.
“This is a very interesting application for drones, which at their core are essentially flying cameras, and by using other advanced capabilities of our Snapdragon processors, Alarm.com is designing a whole new way to provide security to properties,” says Hugo Swart, senior director, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “The Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight platform pushes the boundaries of the drone industry and has led to many new form factors and use cases, and Alarm.com, with its security expertise, is taking commercial and residential security systems to the next level by integrating intelligent and cutting edge drones to its solutions.”
The Future of Home Security
Sunflower Labs and Alarm.com are amongst the first companies to develop drones and machine learning when is comes to home security, but we are sure they will not be the last. The future is pointing to more advanced systems to keep home’s and business’s more secure 24/7/365. For more information about the latest home security systems, contact one of our experienced home automation specialists today.
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