Wild hogs have become a huge problem in places like Louisiana, rooting up fields in their quest for food and generally being extraordinary 200 pound pests. Given their size, smarts, and tenacity, feral hogs can be hard to kill—and that's when you can even find them amid all the vegetation. So how do you deal with the problem? If you're like electrical engineers Cy Brown and James Palmer, you strap a $5,000 thermal imaging camera to a remote-controlled airplane, then fly the thing around farmers' fields on weekend evenings until you spot a hog. Then you shoot it from the ground with a night vision-equipped rifle.
Brown and Palmer call their homemade, pig-hunting drone the Dehogaflier. The drone itself runs around $10,000 with all the gear attached, and it can feed live video to a screen on the ground, where the operator flies the plane with a joystick. It sounds expensive, but it can be far cheaper than hog hunting using other methods. (Hog hunting from helicopters is a real thing you can do; its practitioners even use industry-specific puns like "Black Hawg Down.")
A local Louisiana newspaper followed the men out into a field recently to watch the Dehogaflier do its work, and results came quickly:
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via http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/hunting-feral-pigs-at-night-with-drones/
