Civilian Drones at Churchill Club
August 2015 – A recent Churchill Club event in Palo Alto focused on the current state of the Drone industry and the near term future of the marketplace. The panel consisted of Skydio, Dronebase, DJI, 3D Robotics and Skycatch and the discussion was moderated by Robin Murdoch of Accenture. The drone market is maturing and advancing very quickly, and all the panelists firms had received new funding in the past year for market expansion.
At this time all the Fortune 500 companies are discussing or deploying a drone strategy. The consumer space is driven by video capture and primarily private channel or you tube posting. The issue of drones has grown to the point that the FAA is in the process of declaring new regulatory policies, including the issuance of drone pilot licenses. In the business sector, the enterprise groups are the ones directed to manage the drone issue, and determine the best use models to bring a low cost of adoption and high rate of value across marketplaces. This enterprise application space runs into direct conflict with the public view on drones which is focusing on the privacy aspects and open airspace issues in local communities.
3D Robotics Mapping Drone
The consumer space is heavily hobby and creative content capture based. Its use is growing almost exponentially in the amount of content being created. To support this growth on a longer term basis, the drones need more autonomous controls to have awareness of their surroundings. This includes issues such as geofencing for airports and secure areas, altitude limits, speeds, and access to open areas that are both public and private.
In the industrial sector the new application for drones is to provide aerial coverage of activities and terrain where there was traditionally only terrestrial information. This is bringing new data to businesses that drive new optimization methods. This data is creating new cloud markets for companies like AWS on data storage and image processing. This are has been dominated by construction and mining applications in the past, but agriculture and other service markets are growing.
The panel agreed that data and image processing software development has to happen faster. New algorithms and simplified interfaces need to be developed to mode the applications from the scientific space to the industrial and commercial space. The cost of the media development is dropping with the use of consumer cameras like the GoPro which are a camera of choice for many drone applications. The panel, which was comprised by non-professional content creation companies, postulated that the use of low cost consumer cameras would displace professional cinema and studio cameras in the near future. They made this relation as a parallel to Hadoop displacing SQL in the transaction world. While the use of consumer cameras has a place for certain types of production, the professional camera and cinematography industry does not really have to worry about being displaced.
One of the issues was the use and accuracy of the sensors being put on the drones. In many instances the GPS can get lost in flight and fail where there are obstructions and buildings nearby. Other sensors, such as sonar that are being put in the systems have a tradeoff challenge – increased awareness but reduced flight time due to power draw. The power draw issue is bounded by the weight limits of the drone and the amount of battery and payload that can be carried.
All of these issues and the sensor / imaging application tradeoff is making drones more of a platform for the enterprise to use, rather than a tool. As a result, there will not be just one configuration of the product, but many that have a unified software interface and cloud interface for the data. This data will be processed in both real time to validate the capture and later in a data science mode to provide new metrics and deterministic information about operating conditions of a workplace.
