How drones will change the industry

For most people, drones are associated with soldiers and mad scientists who are busy in their backyard. Thanks to technological breakthroughs — including longer and safer flights — and new laws introduced this year, the use of drones goes beyond military use and consumer markets, and enters business territory. Analysts from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimate the market for business services to use UAVs at $ 127 billion .

DJI introduced technological innovations to the masses through the popular series of ready-made drones Phantom. The newest models have the possibility of gyro-stabilization, and the flight time triples compared with what was achievable only a couple of years ago. And all this at an affordable price of $ 1000.
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Simply put, cost and iron have reached a point where drones are available for most business use schemes. In the United States in June, the turning point came when every company that passed online certification was allowed to use drones for commercial purposes. Before that, it was necessary to use individuals with a drone operator license, which was inconvenient and expensive.

We see a wide range of applications for the use of UAVs in business - so wide that it is even difficult to imagine. Intel has just introduced a UAV specifically designed for industrial use, for example, for construction and operational control. Oil and gas companies use drones to ensure the safety and maintenance of equipment, and Amazon is known for its efforts to deliver drones.

Grain companies advertise the use of drones in agricultural activities, distribute free UAVs to farmers and train them, giving farmers the opportunity to survey crops. UPS recently used a drone to deliver drugs to an island near Boston. Recently, I spoke with a company that marked out parts of the highway in Mexico that needed repair. The resolution of satellite images is not large enough, and the marking with the help of a car would take too much time. Drones coped with the task in a few days.

There are a huge number of niche applications - from insurers who assess damages caused by the elements to urban companies that monitor the condition of aqueducts.

A new market for business drone applications requires a new ecosystem. Entrepreneurs in this field work as consultants for companies that need drone pilots and service providers - something like Uber in the world of UAVs. For example, companies hire drone operators to inspect remote equipment, instead of risking employee safety or hiring a specialist to do just one job.

This handicraft drone industry is crucial to the emerging drones business market. No one has yet appreciated the number of providers of such services, but it seems to me that there are already tens of thousands of them.

Up to this point, ready-made equipment from manufacturers such as DJI was not ready for industrial use. Pioneers of the industry, such as Airware and Kespry , built their own iron platform in addition to the software ecosystem. The situation is changing. Recently, companies such as DroneDeploy , Skycatch and Propeller , which have focused on software, have advanced more than others.

These companies benefit from focusing only on software and on the growing ecosystem of many software vendors. It seems to me that the trend will develop according to a pattern similar to standardization in the smartphone industry - creating your own hardware for drones will rarely be profitable. Several promising categories for the next wave of commercial software for drones are flight control, behavior management and improved control response, as well as real-time analytical processing.

The media likes to tell futuristic stories about cities filled with scurrying drones that have filled the sky. But they write less about the fact that millions of drones are already in use, that they are already beneficial for the business, and what opportunities are opened with their help - opportunities that were previously too expensive or unattainable.

Drones are already affecting the development of various industries and changing business patterns. Similarly, the way ip-telephony very quickly became ubiquitous, and drones will soon be encountered in all aspects of our life.