5 take-away's from Commercial UAV Expo Europe

I had the opportunity to attend the Commercial UAV Expo Europe last week in Brussels. I’m a big believer in the phrase, “I don’t know what I don’t know”. So while a lot of the info I gathered during the 3 days reinforced what I already knew, I did come away with a long list of new things I now know I did not know… That make sense?

Anyway, my key take-away's are;

Automation is the future.

It came up time and time again. While the H/W technology of Drones is really cool, the vast majority of the investment $’s are now flowing towards S/W.

Specifically S/W to automate;

1>    Drone operations; both control & air traffic management.

2>    Analysis of the collected sensor data AND automatically inserting the resulting information into a workflow without the need for human intervention.

And it was good to hear a clear distinction being called out between control & command. Automated S/W will ‘control’ the Drone for safe flight operations. A Human will command the Drone, as in tell it what to do but not manually fly it. That’s a very important distinction. Now for folks out there planning a career in being a commercial drone pilot, don’t worry. Automated ‘everything’ is going to take a while yet. Especially as there is a vast amount of regulation that needs to be enacted for all this to become a reality. But the technology is getting there.

Air Traffic Management is key area

Given the key drivers of Security & Privacy, be it with human piloted drones today or full automated swarms of drones in the future, then a real-time air traffic management system is key. And it has to be integrated into the overall Aviation Industry’s systems. Now it’s complex. The required legislation has to be agreed on 1st so that the Air Traffic Management system has defined rules to enforce. All Drones will be required to ‘say who they are’ in real-time. And to enforce these rules, who’s going to ‘patrol’ the air space? Swarms of ‘good’ drones’, as only ‘good’ drones can deal with ‘bad’ drones. We humans are simply too slow to react. 

Social Acceptance is a ‘must have’

Social Acceptance of drones comes down to individuals knowing in real-time what a specific drone is up to. People generally see a drone used by the emergency services as good. But a drone perceived to detecting speeding drivers or simply delivering a pizza might not. So people will need to know what a given drone is up to in real-time. Think of a FlightRadar24 type app for drones. You see a drone flying by and via the app you can get the drones unique ID, it’s flight plan, you know who’s commanding it and what’s task it’s performing. [Now you might still want to shoot it down, but that's a different topic...]

And this level of integration is not that far fetched. There were a number of Air Traffic Management providers at the event offering various levels of capabilities, but nothing to my knowledge that is fully automated, trusted and in real-time. For all this to happen, me thinks this is where 5G & Blockchain technologies will play a big part down the road.

You have to understand Asset Integrity Strategies.

Colin Hickey from Sky-Futures called out a key point. ‘… It’s not just about rocking up with a drone any more, you have to understand your clients Asset Integrity Management Strategy…’

This is so true. At its most basic, it’s not just about doing an inspection of say a Wind Turbine, detecting loads of brown marks and presenting a report to the client to say ‘look at all these’. The drone service provider has to be able to determine what these brown marks are. Water staining? Corrosion? Level of Corrosion etc.. But even that’s no longer enough to add value.

If your client operates under a ‘run to fail’ asset strategy, then believe it or not, they will not care about corrosion unless it’s at a point where an imminent failure will occur. Now I’m WAY oversimplifying this, but Drone Service Providers will have to understand such strategies for specific industries & for specific assets in order to deliver a complete service. In my opinion, that’s how drone service providers will define their competitive advantage.

Innovation in this Industry is only beginning.

A theme in the opening keynotes was that trying to ‘size’ this industry is a bit of a fool’s errand. It all depends on what you put in-scope in terms of the use cases that drones can & will be deployed to do. It’s the number and variety of use cases that will drive the size of the industry.

Personally I’d not even dreamed of drones being used to detect & destroy land mines [Mine Kafon]. Or a 25Meter fixed-wing drone tethered to an old wind turbine platform in the North Sea used to generate energy [Ampyx Power]. Or using drones to deploy mosquito larvicide into detected water pools [Vectrino]. A drone that flies with 6 degrees of freedom, that you can land it on a vertical wall [Voliro].

The list goes on and on.. it really makes you think. The possibilities...

Kudos to EUKA for organizing the Drone Europe Hero competition. The innovative ideas on display and the passionate individuals that made them a reality were impressive.

Feel free to agree/comment/criticize…

Kevin.

P.S. Now the ‘elephant in the room’ is the need to have EU wide Regulation developed and enforced in order to develop a harmonized Drone Service Market across the EU. The EASA’s proposal on operating small drones in Europe is getting the ball rolling. But that’s a topic for another day. 

P.P.S. To see some photos of what was presented & demo'ed, you can check out some of the photos I posted from the event via Commercial UAV Expo Moments over on Twitter.