DRONES — Flying Into The Future
Those who dream of getting yummy food, an Amazon package, a prescription drug, or even a beer delivered to their doorsteps via drone might have their wishes fulfilled sooner than expected.
Have you ever thought about where you get your food from? No, I’m not talking about using Zomato/Swiggy on your phone or even going to the local market or Reliance Fresh/Metro. Where do you really get your food from? Let’s take the example of a paratha. What are the components of a paratha? Wheat flour/Atta, vegetables stuffed into it and butter/oil. There are also condiments such as pickle, curd or “special chutney/sauce”.
Let’s take just one ingredient, say tomato pickle : tomatoes — the number one plant in the edibles category. They are planted either late Spring or early Fall. They are quite greedy — they require 6–8 hours of afternoon sunlight, a 3-feet pot for each plant, pH levels only between 6.2 to 6.8 and at least 4 inches of compost. Keep monitoring for 80 days, and voila, you got your ripe tomatoes! Of course, you also have to keep pests out, make sure it does not get humid and keep water levels optimal. All this just for one ingredient of one food item that you consume.
Farming is a huge industry. There are currently over 7.3 billion people in the world, with an expected population of over 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 in 2050. With such a monumental need of food, we need to ensure that we have enough resources, and that we are using them in the most optimal way. Fruit and vegetable farmers responding to a Feedback survey reported that they wasted up to 37,000 tonnes of produce every year — around 16 per cent of their crop. This quantity would be enough to provide 250,000 people with their recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day for a year.
What can we do? We need better irrigation management, better mapping and better control over how we grow the crops and vegetables. Enter Drones.
The Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Integration Pilot Program has jump-started the development of the drone industry world over. Aerial enterprises such as drone delivery and aerial imagery are poised to take off. The potential economic benefit of integrated unmanned airborne systems will generate an estimated $82 billion and create up to 100,000 jobs by 2025, while aerial imaging is expected to generate $3.3 billion by 2023.
Driving that growth are new and expanding application areas. Aerial technology is transforming industries of all types by optimizing processes, cutting costs, and reaching both figurative and literal places that were once unattainable. Here are five industries that are being disrupted by this new, lifesaving technology.
How drones are transforming the world, one step at a time…
1. Disaster relief and humanitarian aid.
The first thing disaster responders do in an emergency is find out what happened, how many people need help and what assistance the survivors need. To get an overview as quickly as possible, disaster managers use everything at their disposal: they read reports, call their local counterparts, drive to the scene of the disaster, request satellite images, and check social media. Nowadays, disaster responders have another source of information at their disposal: drones.
Drones are small, comparatively cheap and can quickly provide images of a disaster-affected area. Compared to satellites they have two big advantages. Firstly, drone images have a much higher resolution than satellite images, which means that disaster managers get a clearer picture of what is going on. Secondly, drones can fly under the clouds. This is particularly important after hurricanes or typhoons when it often takes two to three days before clouds dissipate and satellites are able to see the ground again.
The biodegradable drone can support canisters, medically sensitive liquids, batteries and other life-saving items and disperse them to an area the size of Mumbai. Now medical supplies can be delivered to rural areas without roads or regions rendered inaccessible by natural disasters or war.
2. Public transit.
Local transportation agencies such are using aerial imagery as a base map — a collection of GIS data and imagery that form the background setting and orientation of the map.
Aerial photographs integrated with third-party programs like Autodesk and Esri products help in project management oversight, planning and site analysis, and validating construction updates (lane, roadway and sidewalk updates).
3. Drones for Agriculture
According to a Dronefly press release, the use of drones in the agriculture can basically be boiled down to four segments: Crop field scanning with compact multispectral imaging sensors, GPS map creation through on-board cameras, heavy payload transportation, and livestock monitoring with thermal-imaging camera-equipped drones.
In simple terms, you can scan your crop, map the surface, deliver items and count animals using drones.
What is interesting is the sheer labor and effort it took to accomplish the above mentioned four tasks before drones came into the picture. Farmers needed huge air-crafts, heavy lifting machinery, trucks, and manual labor to accomplish the above mentioned tasks. And now they are solved using a 50 pound device that has four vertically oriented propellers.
And when you have time, check out the full, beautifully designed infographics that tells you how exactly drones achieve their use cases.
4. Ocean mapping.
Realizing that the ocean is critical to human existence — the source of 97 percent of the planet’s water and producer of more than half of the oxygen in the atmosphere — it may come as a surprise that 85 percent of the ocean’s surface remains unmapped and unexplored.
Aerial imagery has played a part in bridging that gap. High-resolution photos from aircraft camera systems can capture and retrieve surface current data and measure Doppler shift in waves. This method is cost-effective, timely and scalable; it can cover large surface areas.
This process has implications for the oil and gas industry. Using the data extracted from the aerial captures, oil companies can plan and execute offshore exploration, conduct deep-water drilling operations, reinforce oil spill response and mitigation, and assist in search-and-rescue missions.
5. Drones for Surveying — Story of A Switzerland Startup
When I started writing this article,as a part of my research, I came across a company that is the world’s leading VTOL drone producer located in Switzerland — Wingtra AG.
What was the idea of Wingtra?
When you think about drones, there are two major types. Multicopters — these take-off and land vertically, have excellent precision, but cannot cover lot of area. And Fixed Wings — these use wings to generate lift, can travel long distance but hard to use for inexperienced drone users since they need to be hand launched. To bridge this gap-they have leveraged the usability factor of a Quadcopter with the large coverage that you obtain from Fixed Wings.
Intially, they had a pilot at all times to monitor the drone/drones. Back then the drone was basically a cardboard with 2 motors. And now, they have a fully autonomous product. The main use case was to be mapping and surveying professional tech product that could be put to use in mining, animal counting, mapping a topography, and so on. It started with us flying the device once a week to now it being flown more than 1000 times a week around the world.
What was the most challenging part of building this?
The most important part of the technology is the transition phase — to be able to combine the functionality of a quadcopter and a fixed wing. This took us the longest time to achieve.
The second most gripping challenge was safety, since this device is interacting with people out there. For academic purposes, it was okay when there were a few failures. But, when you start to sell commercially, it had to be 100/100 so people who’ve never seen it before can still use it safely.
How does the technology work to create this magic?
There are multiple sensors on the device that make it work — an air speed sensor, a magnetic compass to measure orientation, inertial measurement unit and a small micro-controller that takes in all of this input.
On the user’s side, there is a tablet which has a very simple UI. All they have to do is denote the area they want to map in terms of a polygon, and press Start. The plane begins to deconstruct and figure out the most efficiency way to map, takes hundreds of pictures and analyzes this data to show to user .
If the battery is fully charged, it can basically cover 240 American Football fields. (Do you know the area of one field?)
Now that you have a fully autonomous Drone, what’s the next leap?
I think we have made good progress in the aerial imagery and data collection part. However, the data we collect even in a single flight can be quite large: 1000s of images summing to tens of GB. So, an interesting challenge to solve next would be to make the data handling and transfer from the drone to cloud work seamlessly.
And of course, you can never forget the safety side.
Talking about the drone world itself, up until now most drones have been used within the line of sight. The challenge would be build drones that are safe enough to be operated beyond visual of sight as well. Another challenge is to incorporate the air traffic to find the best possible routes of travel.
6. Drones for Delivery
There is no story complete without Amazon peeking in for a glance. Amazon was granted a new patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a delivery drone that can respond to human gestures. From two-day delivery to two-hour delivery, Amazon’s next vision is to get this down to less than 30 minutes.
According to the patent, the drone’s communication system would include an array of sensors, including a depth sensor and cameras to detect visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. The drones would be able to recognize hand and body gestures, human voices and movement, such as a person walking closer to the drone or away from it (It can even detect when people are shooing it away!).
Alibaba, the Amazon equivalent in China, has also got its hands dirty in the drone delivery business.However, they view drones not as a last-mile problem solver, but more so as an intermediate heavy-traffic-skipping vehicle.
Currently, drone delivery is only for the 22.5-square-mile Shanghai Jinshan Industrial Park, but there are plans to expand the program to other cities in coming years.
Amazon’s all-electric Prime Air drone is expected to start autonomously delivering packages to customers within months, in a bid to get orders to buyers faster than the one-day delivery service.
The news was announced yesterday at Amazon’s inaugural re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, where the online retailer unveiled the latest design of its Prime Air drone.
Fully electric and autonomous, the drone can fly up to 24 kilometers and deliver packages weighing under 2.2 kilograms to customers in less than 30 minutes.
The perception needs to move away from the idea that a drone is simply taking a photo of something — now, it’s much more than that. Drone technology has the ability to map out many data points, so collating these accurately and quickly is exciting. The next few years will be all about connecting the information dots to quickly present a full picture. This will offer a multitude of industries the ability to efficiently collect and understand information pertinent to their specific needs. What’s more futuristic than that?
To conclude, the era of drones has shifted from being merely a device used to take pictures to a device that will (hopefully) solve some of the gripping problems around the world surrounding food, safety and transportation.
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If you would like to get in touch to talk more, please reach out to me on LinkedIn.
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