disruption on the runways.
This week, coding friendly drones, Downing rogue drones and DIY health
checks in blue domes? Drones could transform our skies as we know them,
aching deliveries, watching over us and even saving lives. But his
recent flight disruptions have taught us, there are also possible
downsides from unwanted ones. Last December, here at Gatwick Airport,
chaos ensued. After reports of repeated drone sightings, a thousand
flights were disrupted, 140,000 passengers affected and all of this
was said to add up to a cost of £50 million. Soon after, there was a
similar scare at Heathrow as well as at Newark Airport in the US. But how
do we take down problem drones safely? Well, Dan Simmons has been
to the Netherlands where the national police force is sponsoring
a competition that hopes to find new ways of doing just that. In a hangar
in the middle of nowhere in the know the lungs. An epic air battle is
about to commence. Nine teams from across Europe and America are trying
to smash each other out of the sky and grab the 30,000 euros top prize
in the title 2019 Drone Clash champions. All they have to do is
down the Queen drone. But the organisers have not made it easy.
This is one of the arena is that one of the teams will start from, blue
and red other colours. They will leave their queen in here and that
is what the opposing team will try to knock out but they will leave our
Queen here. There are fighter drones will come through what is called the
corridor of death, doom and destruction and test the coil behind
me, waiting to knock out one of those fighter drones. CO2 gas pumps
here firing at those drones as they come around the corner. They've got
to get past this tennis ball machine which is going to fireballs. There
is going to be a man with a gun that fires a net through this whole to
try to take out those drones if they come round. Lights will be flushing
to try to drown - blind the pilot but once they get down this corridor
of doom, death and destruction, they get to their opponent was Mike arena
and a chance to take out the Queen. With all this destruction of kits
going on, it's perhaps surprisingly no-one is called the cops but that's
because they are the ones sponsoring the event.In this contest, we hope
to come across new creative ideas that we can adapt and use in our
police matters.Do you have your own ability to bring a drone down?I
will not go in detail about the abilities that we have. We have some
abilities but it's not enough for us for the long run. Actually we were
hoping to see new strategies to help us bringing drones down but I did
see also new threats because perhaps you noticed, there are a lot of
drones that carry some sort of ball around them and some of the measures
we take, it's attacking the rotors. The rotors are now protected by
these balls so it actually poses us with another problem.Enter a
sideshow that involves this tiny drone. Tell me what this is.This is
one of the micro drones flying around, don't crash. The public can
try to have these very tiny drones and can hack into the system and try
to take it over.So if one falls on a heads...You know it is
successful.Three years ago, the Dutch police introduced their own
solution to downing problem drones, trained Eagles, but the programme
ended a year later as the birds couldn't be on hand quickly enough
nor be relied upon to cleanly snatch a drone from the skies rather than
causing it to fall, which could be a problem for anyone below. Back in
the theatre of battle and some teams were getting a hammering. Most have
three or four face is so quick repairs are needed.So we're just
fixing our drones. They got a little bit mangled in the last competition.
This is actually already flattened again. How do you flatten it? She
stands on them.You stand on them? Our primary strategy was to use
brute force which is why we have this gigantic machine. It can fly
without. If it gets damaged, it can still fly which we thought was
amazing however as you can see right now, it is missing stabilisation,
this is quite broken.A lot of the other drones, they have a big mesh
around them to protect the propellers and these will just go in
there and get tangled in any propellers. These ones are good for
the balls as well because they will hang in one of the corner of the
balls and just pull it down.But perhaps overall the event showed the
human flying skills on show were often the deciding factor.It looks
so easy because they are so adept at it. Your brain does somersaults in
its flicking back the other way and it's all bonkers and the speed with
which those drones, they are flying over my head now, the speed with
which they make decisions and flips and reverse is just nuts. This is an
airborne version of robot wars. My kids know nothing of robot wars but
they will know about this. Both my boys have drones so aerial battling
drones, it doesn't get any better. There is at his Lukoil in there, for
God's sake.On the fringes of the battlefield, companies and the
growing business of taking out drones are showing off their
solutions. This system is already operating at a Norwegian airport. It
tracks and then identifies drones as a threat before jamming the
frequencies used to control them.In a usual environment, when you drown
- jam the drone, it will start hovering and go back to his operator
or it will go down eventually on the battery. It can also jam the global
positioning system. The drone will start hovering around, flying around
because it doesn't know where it is and eventually it will go down also.
This beast, is the drone catcher, making use of radar systems already
in the field to get its targets real-time 3D co-ordinates before
automatically flying to the area and lining up its prey.We ship the net
over the drone. We can carry it away with a wire and drop it down with a
parachute.And then there is this. The gun emits a powerful
electromagnetic beam, knocking out the command and control, video link
and GPS frequencies used by the drone. Strict regulations in Europe
mean it can't be used here but its Dutch makers told me they are doing
good business with governments in the Middle East. Back in the arena,
and the final was under way. In the end, it came down to brute force and
battery power, with the Belgian team flying away with the 30,000 prize.
The Dutch authorities certainly have a more entertaining way of learning
how to down rogue drones than standing around and scratching their
heads. Down there looking at some serious ideas as to how to take
drones out of the sky as well as those that seem to turn it into a
sport. But of course, initially we need to be sure if there actually is
a drone present and, if so, exactly where it is. These electromagnetic
spectrum tracking technology has just been deployed at Gatwick.So
everything that emits a electro frequency or radiofrequency, it will
be able to see and detect. It will know whether it's a drone or
something else.So how exactly does the setup work? You have to devices
talking to each other?Exactly. You have to senses and each of them are
getting a bearing on the drone itself. They get to the bearing by
the angle of arrival of the signal from the drone to the particular
sensor and by comparing the two directions, it can triangulate the
position of the drone at any one time.At this point now, if a
similar happen - a similar incident happened to what took place at
Gatwick, how much of a difference could your technology make to the
outcome?We believe it could make a significant difference. Number one
you would know categorically if there was a drone there or not.
Certainly a drone imaging characteristic signals. And number
two, you would know where the controller was and be able to take
action appropriately.What are your plans to roll this out elsewhere?
It's already being rolled out, a lot of interest in the UK and globally,
not only from our ports but also a number of other organisations and
situations, from stadium to private individuals.OK, but for now, you
think we've got a system that could make a difference?For now, we've
got a system that makes a tremendous difference.High, and welcome to the
week intact. This week, transport group Stagecoach tested out of
full-size driverless bus for the first time in the UK. Google
unveiled the new gaming platform, Stadia. More on that soon. And on
the flipside, the company is being fined £1.28 billion from the EU for
blocking on line rival search advertisers. It was also the week
MIT C cell unveiled a robot it's been kind of keeping in the dark.
The system allows the robotic arm to precisely pick up and place objects
it's never seen before by mapping out key points on it so the bot's
algorithm - algorithms can work out how best to handle it. Social
networking site MySpace, remember them, announced they lost 12 years
worth of music uploads. A message on its website says any photos, videos
and audio files uploaded more than three years ago may not longer be
available. The company says the mistake is due to a server migration
project. And finally, are you good at art? Yeah? Well, I'm not. Well,
Nvidia has developed an AI to make you a master artiste. It is called
Gauguin, unusual network, it takes your pencil strokes and colour fills
and transforms them into bits of nature almost instantly. Now that is
a work of art. The boss of Google is the first two met he is no game but
who can argue with a man who speaks this kind of hard truth to
Americans?For those of you who are wondering what cricket is, it's kind
of like baseball but better.If Sundar Pichai is a smart about
gaming as he is about sport, he is surely onto a winner with the latest
launch. Google stadium isn't streaming only platform, all
delivered down your Internet connection. That means no discs, no
downloads and all accessible through just about any of your devices.
What's important here is that Google thinks it is found a way around some
of the huge problems that have faced game streaming services in the past
such as high latency race that - rates that cause lag. To help with
this there is an optional Stadia controller which connects
independently to the Internet to minimise any delay between you
pressing a button and something happening in the game. How are you
confident that that is going to work when there is potentially millions
of people all playing at once?So our vision was always to make sure
we could deliver the quality and vision of the game developer all the
way to the gamer in their home. So we have put some incredible
technology and hardware and software services in our data centre to make
sure that happens and that means we can deliver up to 4K, 60 frames per
second, HDR and surroundsound which of the latest and greatest audio and
visual technologies that gamers expect but we are doing it
streaming.Google hasn't yet confirmed how it plans to sell this
to gamers. Most people expect a subscription model. Think of it like
a Netflix or video games.It sounds really good and interesting on
paper. I love especially their whole conversation about wanting to expand
damning's accessibility to a wider audience than on paper it sounds
like this could do that. That said, I think there are a lot of questions
left as to whether an execution this is actually going to be the answer.
Google's announcement has been the talking point because if they
managed to pull it off it will change the industry forever and that
may not be a good thing. If it does end up being a subscription model,
they could be argued huge impact on how companies make their money. Some
people are already predicting we may start to see an already greater
number of endgame payments for loss revenue. Then there is the issue of
paying for a fast enough Internet connection to make it work.With
advancements we compression algorithm all the time we can
increase the quality without increasing the bandwidth
requirement.Google announced partnerships but if the company is
going to entice hard-core gamers away from box and PlayStation they
will need more than that.Today it was about showing our vision, to see
the capabilities of our platforms and how they can bring their
creativity and technology.Would you have any more on board?Absolutely.
How many more? I am not going to share that with you today. Bringing
absolutely the latest games. It gives you an indication of our
direction of travel.The company will announce the launch date and
how much it will all cost in June. The E3 gaming. That was safely in
San Francisco. Now, in some parts of the world it has become pretty
commonplace for kids to learn to code but for those with vision
problems, it is still fairly inaccessible so we sent Paul Carter
to find out what some of the big tech companies are doing to open up
coding to children who are blind or partially sighted. This is
eight-year-old Ellie, like many children her age she is learning how
to code. She also happens to be blind. She is using a physical,
tactile coding language called co- jumper. It is a modular system
developed by Microsoft. Each pod contains a single line of code,
making up a story, a poem or in this case, a song.# row, Row, row your
boat gently down the stream at... Lyric and make.What makes co-
jumper unique is that it allows blind and partially sighted children
to have a partial view of the code with their hands. A computer
scientist at Microsoft Cambridge laboratory, who has a blind son is
with me.The technology were not available to them so many children
learn programming, starting at the age of seven, with block base
languages. The other aspect we should not forget is recreated this
to be available to children regardless of vision so it is
available to children who are blind and sighted. It is one of the things
we were aware of is that we did not want to create a technology that
isolated the blind child at the back of the class but something that
could engage with other children. But code jumper is only one
solution.Some of you are new to Apple iPad accessory and coding...
At Linden Lodge, a school for sensory impairment in South London,
I went to see how Apple are working with the Royal Institute for blind
people to increase access to swift playground its own coding app. Apple
is using its accessibility tools already built into its devices such
as large text, voice-over, in conjunction with school assistant
tech.It says go here, go here, go here.And that is where it is. They
have created braille and tactile maps for each level of the app so
they can use it.Images, diagrams, I think it is a healthy dynamic mix of
old and new and perhaps some experimentation as well.The
children here are using swift playground to create code that will
make a small drone fly.You know, it is incredible. Things will say
things like I did not think I would ever be able to do this. This is
awesome, I want to do this as a career. That is fantastic, it is
contagious and other kids pick up on it. They didn't know if those tools
were accessible and before you know it we have lots of people interested
and that is what we want to do, spread the magic and show what is
possible. APPLAUSE
. Now recently Click has been taking a look at some of the latest tech to
come out of Dubai and one start-up is hoping to make checks as easily
as trip to the shop. I am about to step into a new kind of health
check. It requires no GP, no nurse, not even a doctors office. These
pods are being produced in the United Arab Emirates, they provide a
full body checkup in less than ten minutes. The pods take a number of
readings throughout the check, such as your weight, blood pressure,
glucose levels. You are guided through the process by an
interactive display. Part of the future accelerator programme is to
tackle the obesity problem.Over 60% of the population is overweight. It
is an endemic problem with diabetes, of course so trying to encourage
communities to take ownership of their health journey, really, to
reduce their weight, to offset that against the diabetes problem which
costs the economy a lot of money. The person can go inside and perform
all these tests without the need for a nurse, the assistance from a nurse
or attending a doctor's clinic and what that does is it raises the
awareness in the community and makes people more engaged and more
concerned about monitoring their health and more enthusiastic about
keeping track of their health in general.It is a bit surreal sitting
in a bright blue pod having your blood pressure taken. This could be
anywhere, this could be in a mall, in a pharmacy. The idea is to put it
so anyone can pop in and have a full body check. You can then choose to
send your health data to an app.One of the big benefits of the system is
that it is use of control. You have complete control of the data. You
elect, within the programme itself, you can think of who you want to
share the data with, whether you want to share it at all. You are in
control of your wellness. At any time you can show your doctor
measurements but also into the corporate set-up, in terms of they
might engage with the programme and decide to have a corporate wellness
effort within the company.My results did match what I expected,
what might not be good... You do not need to see that. There was a bit of
fluctuation when we repeated the test. There is always a worry that
an inaccurate result could lead to self-diagnosis. After that, I am off
to the gym. Emily in Dubai. That's it for this week's show. If you want
to find out what the team get up to throughout the week, you can find us
on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Thank you for watching.