Sunflower Home Awareness System Uses a Drone to Protect your House
Recent advancements in the sensor technology have given us a number of smart home security systems to choose from. But most of them have fixed cameras, which doesn’t make them smart enough to view things inside or outside your property. Palo Alto-based Sunflower Labs has built a home awareness system that supervises homes beyond the doorway. The Sunflower Home Awareness System is really easy to setup and use.
Combining Light and Flight
The Sunflower Home Awareness System consists of a drone and a handful of in-ground solar-powered smart lights to keep an eye over your property. Each light contains more than a dozen sensors and they work together to detect motion, vibrations, and sound. The quadcopter carries a camera and uses the smart lights as navigational beacons.
The system is designed to use its artificial intelligence to identify sound and determine if it’s potentially dangerous. The system is designed to remember your home’s usual patterns that would make it easy to disregard regular events like your car in the driveway or your pet in the backyard.
Usefulness of the Sunflower Home Awareness System
- Alerts: Whenever there is an unusual activity around your property, the smart lights work with the Sunflower Flying Camera to identify what’s happening. When a smart light detects something strange, it sends the Flying Camera to the point of interest and gives you a live video on your mobile device.
- Smart Lights: The Sunflower Smart Lights are beautiful garden lights. You can add ambiance with designer lighting themes. The Sunflower Smart lights run on solar energy and have a solar panel for charging. It has 360 degrees motion sensors that detect movement. You can use warm lights for ambiance and brighter lights for security. The smart lights come with a mic and speaker that sense and deter unwanted visitors. It also has vibration sensors that identify footsteps.
- Flying Camera: The Sunflower Flying Camera is a drone that has differential GPS for precise navigation around your property. The flying camera uses the advanced autopilot mode for autonomous flight. It has a gimbaled high-resolution camera with infrared light for night vision and a downward facing camera for stabilization.
- App: The Sunflower Home Awareness System comes with a companion app. You can use the app to tell Sunflower when to alert you and when to handle things on its own.
Easy to Install
The Sunflower Home Awareness System is easy to install. You need to stick the smart lights in your yard. You can use Sunflower on its own, or connect it with other smart home devices.
How will the System Work?
The Sunflower Smart Lights are placed around a property and they use sensors to detect motion, vibrations, or sound. These sounds, motions, and vibrations are then compared to the daily activities. If anything unusual is found by the smart light, then the flying camera is sent to the point of interest and give you a live video feed on your device. Alerts are sent using the Sunflower companion app and you can either choose to dismiss the alert or deploy the Sunflower Flying Camera.
Coming in 2017
The Sunflower Labs is planning to launch the Smart Lights first in the market, followed by the launch of Smart Flying Camera. The company says that the system will be made available in 2017 and can be reserved for $25 online. There has not been much information on the price of the system, but the lights are expected to cost $159 each.
Protect your Home with this New System
The Home Awareness System by the Sunflower Labs is a great system that combines terrestrial feedback and aerial observations. The company is also working to integrate the system with voice assistants such as Siri and Amazon Echo.
Dhruvil is a Writer & Marketeer for Nimblechapps, joined in December 2014, based out of Sydney, Australia. He has worked briefly as a Branding and Digital Marketing Manager before moving to Australia. At Nimblechapps, he worked on Social Media Marketing, Branding, Email Marketing and Blogging. Dhruvil studies Business at University of Western Sydney, and also handles Operations for the company in Australia.