Drone, The Ultimate Disruptive Flying Machine

Article by Suwan Juntiwasarakij, PhD, Senior Editor

Vastly popular as hobbies, unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming a valuable enterprise technology—and an emerging trend is set to increase that value and expand their use. New software is able to automate both drone navigation and the analysis of the data drones capture. This is making more practical a host of drone applications: monitoring construction, agricultural crops, goods and materials inventories, traffic, and crowds; infrastructure inspection; catastrophe response; search and rescue; and perimeter security. Other applications are sure to emerge. Ultimately, enterprises should move beyond simply employing drones where convenient and integrate drone data into their information systems and revamp workflows to take full advantage of the greater insights and efficiencies that drones can provide.​

The Application Landscape

Up-to-date, global drone market expected to rise to from US$2 billion today to US$127 billion by 2020; this is according to PwC. Infrastructure, agriculture and transport are key industries that will spur growth in the market for drone services. Drone service solutions can range from delivering goods in just half an hour to verifying insurance claims and watering crops. For infrastructure inspection, owners can augment or replace human inspection of potentially failing materials, structural elements, or pipeline or ducting leaks.

Drones are also used in transport for last-mile services where flying vehicles replace postal carriers in hard-to-reach locations. Drones can delivery parts to ships underway or supplies to remote locations not easily served by manned aircraft or ground transportation. In agriculture, they’re used to gather and analyze crop data quickly, and carry out precise spraying on plants. There are even plans for miniature drones to be used to pollinate plants in areas where bee and butterfly populations are struggling. Farmers can immediate identify problem areas and tune water, fertilizer, herbicide, or pesticide levels accordingly.​

Alternatives to Traditional Transits

Henry Ford once said, “Mark my words. A combination of airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile. But it will come.” Today, drones have increasingly gained popularity, and the regulations have supported their commercial use, passenger drones and flying cars appear to be moving closer to reality, with aerospace and aircraft design technology being developed rapidly. Many passenger drone and flying manufacturers have already pass the conceptualization or design phase, and a majority of them are currently in the prototyping and testing stage, with most manufacturers expecting delivery by 2020. In term of technology, industry is at an advanced development phases, and if safely and regulatory hurdles are cleared, passenger drones are expected to get wings by 2020.

Security and Military Defense

Overtime, drones are set to improve business efficiency through the lowering of labor and service costs, and have the potential to deliver real-time data that could benefit every sector from the military to transport. According to Drone Report, BI Intelligence predicts that the global aerial drone market will be worth over $12bn by 2024. Military use of drones will significantly outweigh civilian use and the military sector will continue to lead in its drone focused spending due to the high costs of military drones and rising demand from countries investing in this form of defense.

The Killer Apps, However

Nevertheless, drone could be put to use in its full potential when equipped with the right application software. That is, smart software makes it easier to get value from drones. To illustrate, Walmart has computer vision-enabled drones monitoring warehouse inventory by mid-2017, negotiating warehouse aisles and using specialized software to recognize low stock or misplaced items. While the company’s current manual inventory process is on a 30-day cycle, company officials expect drones to complete the task in a single day. For another example, it makes possible for tracking shopping trends by counting cars in retailer parking lots using deep learning software on drone imagery and automatically identifying unauthorized vehicles on construction sites.

Caution Attached

Despite all the benefits, like any technology, drones are only as good as the people who use them, according to Raconteur analysis. Fears that they will be abused are typified by criminals using them to smuggle drugs into prisons and track police movements, and fears that terrorists could weaponize them. That’s why governments from Canada to China have brought in strict rules to control the use of drones, for example near airports. China, the world’s biggest producer of the flying machines, has gone a step further, ruling that all drones must be traceable back to an individual owner, while police in Wuhan in Central China have recently taken delivery of drone busting rifles that emit radio-jamming signals to knock drones out of the sky.