Drones are not just a weapon of soldiers; neither a kid’s toy now, this powerful combination of talents is metamorphosing the entire industry. The fabulous capabilities of drone are affecting lives by supplying medical aids in remote areas to delivering tasty pizza at our doorstep in just a few minutes. They now are shaping our lives as much as mobile phones, tablet computers, and other similar game-changing technologies. And, in the year 2018, the technology leapfrogged a way beyond our imagination. Let’s have a look at five technologies that disrupted the drone market in 2018.
Flying Beyond Visual Line of Sight
The sky is actually the limit for drone and thus Flying Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) became a new normal for drones in 2018. Flying drones Beyond Visual Line of Sight embodied big opportunity for commercial drone operators and the businesses that rely on them. Looking at its wide benefits many governments around the world allowed operators to fly drones BVLOS. The practice opened the door to a range of new applications. Many drones hit the market designed specifically to fly beyond eyes can see like Trinity F9 by Quantum Systems that has anti-collision light and transponder that transmits the positions to all the other air traffic. Flying drones over long distances helped to inspect miles of oil and gas pipeline in remote areas or hundreds of acres of crops which was impossible earlier.
Automation in drones
Hovering a drone for inspection, developing a solution for drone delivery or deploying an autonomous drone charging or docking station, or even trying to land a drone precisely at a given location is not a challenge anymore as automation made its way to drone industry as well. Not much but to a very extent the drone industry moved towards automation in 2018. Now the operators just unbox the UAV, set it and it is ready to fly by itself. This technological shift in the industry eliminated many problems and has helped operators to focus on other important works then just handling the drone in the sky. However, automation in drone industry has still a long way to go as still there is a need for a consistent system that can support precisely align and land the drone on the designated site, with centimeter-level accuracy.
Advancement in Sense and Avoid technology
Gone are the days when Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were unable to sense and avoid autonomously. Sense and Avoid technology in drones touched a new level of advancement where drones can sense the collision and avoid it. This has helped to avoid mid-air collisions operating in the same airspace. The Sense and Avoid ability has helped to develop and test a field deployable Sense and Avoid systems for both UAS and small aircraft. Many companies are now looking to transfigure and expand the current drone market by including advanced autopilot and hardware technology with their new designs. Some of them are in the market as well that has the required payload and power to use radar and other active sensors in order to detect other aircraft in a wide field of regard.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
As the world is on verge of fourth industrial revolution, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are going to change the way we see the world. Indeed. Artificial and Intelligence and Machine Learning are now in their next level of advancement and in this how can’t they leave the drone industry. AI and Machine Learning transformed the drone industry in 2018. They helped analyze the massive amount of data captured by drone in just no time. Drones often generate humongous amounts of data, in fact sometimes data generated is so gigantic that it becomes hard to handle. In this condition, AI and Machine Learning have helped a lot to sort and analyze data quickly without putting additional efforts. Uniting drone technology with machine learning helped infrastructure managers identify quality defects, malfunctions, or inventory shortages faster and at a lower cost than using traditional techniques.
Real-time drone mapping is now a reality
With recent advancement cameras, edge computing, and mobile hardware processing paved the way for new possibilities in the drone industry. And in this real-time drone mapping became a reality. It is now possible to generate live maps while hovering the drone in the sky with the help of software like Live Map. Live Map stitches aerial imagery as drone flies in the sky, and 60% of real-time maps made are hard to differentiate from cloud-processed data sets. So now it is not required to first map the areas and wait for days to get the map of it.
