8 trends to watch about #drones in 2019

Just coming back from a trip in the US, and having spent some time beginning of this year talking about the industry with other drone players and users, I am pleased to share my list of trends about drones for this year. Enjoy !

#1 – Drones hype is done

One thing looks very clear and obvious to me now and that is we are not anymore in the drone hype bubble. Customers, prospects and industry players we are talking to are having some exceptional experience about drones – with real utilization cases and they have pretty much knowledge about how the drone would behave in different circumstances.

Recent failures and difficulties faced by companies lead to investors being risk averse while investing in drones – even if you had all those advanced technologies like AI, Deeplearning, Bitcoin, Blockchain buzzword. The latest crazy idea I saw was this drone cargo concept from Hel eCrane. But I feel that we will not see more of those ideas in 2019.

#2 – More companies failures and consolidation

The drone market has been hard and is still : expect to see more failures from companies. 2018 have seen some tremendous ones like Airware shutting down – expect also to see consolidation in the market between drones players like the one we saw end 2018 with Delair Tech acquiring Redbird (which was part of Airware).

#3 – Drones in Defense market are becoming real and new giant players are emerging

Interestingly, 2019 has started with 2 key announcements from FLIR :

• The French Army acquired for $89m of black hornet drones – developed by the company ProxDynamics which was acquired in 2016
• FLIR announced last week the acquisition of an other drone company call AERYON

From this, we can conclude two things. One is that drones are getting developed enough to be seen as perfect tools to enhance sensors products (in this case thermal sensors and cameras) – It is expected to see some more of those acquisition or partnerships with key players in other areas. Secondly, we can expert larger orders of drone products in Defense market.

Now, another question arises: will someone go and compete on nano-drone with the FLIR / Black Hornet?

#4 – Real deployments for real use cases in indoor

2018 has been the year where few players started using drones for cycle counting in warehouses – see this video from L’Oreal using EYESEE solution from Hardis Group developed with Squadrone System as an example.

Return on investments are there, value is proven and we can see other use cases arriving like industrial inspection, indoor security…

Expect to see more of those testimonials and deployments in 2019 : drones are bringing a true value in indoor industrial environment !

#5 – Drones will deliver pizzas (or other things) but hope they won’t lose it…

We see numerous experimentations of drones carrying different things – although those will raise serious system issues and might take some time to get proper commercial approval to fly, we will see many test flights in 2019. We are working on one of these cases and it will be real ??

We might also see surprises and more drones might fall in water like some did already - just red this french article as an example of a flight performed in September 2018 with AirMarine for C-Discount which ended in the Garonne river. Is this also a way to differentiate between serious players and amateurs ?

#6 – passenger drones won’t fly in 2019

Despite lots of hype and announcements, I believe we won’t see real deployment of drones carrying people over our heads this year. And not for some years. I was amazed by all the companies working on this topic and the huge amount of money raised by some when reading the last CES report from Olivier Ezratty (starting page 232) – more than 100 companies or V-Tol products with more than 1 billion dollars raised so far. This is real stuff for sure, but full of regulation and safety issues. We will for sure hear more about those in the year to come.

#7 – more blocked airports with drones

We all saw the Gatwick airport being block for few days, with hundreds of flights cancelled between December 19th and 21st following reports of drone sightings close to the runway. More than 140,000 passengers and over 1,000 flights were affected.

Unfortunately this demonstrates how drones can impacts negatively our lives when not used properly and not following regulations. More recently Greenpeace flew over a a nuclear plant in France and drop smoke bombs.

Regulations might strengthen – and the new Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) from JARUS will surely help to have safer use of drones in 2019.

#8 – 1st large orders from industrial companies will arrive

With all the tests being performed over last years by different industry players, we would expect to see this year 1st RFP for several hundreds of drone units coming out. Areas like surveillance and patrol, or industrial inspection might be some of the first to request for several hundred of drones – this would definitely raise the question about capabilities of the players in the market to have large scale manufacturing – as I already mentioned in some other posts, building few drones is one thing, but being able to manufacture large quantities (several hundreds or thousands) is not at all the same and we saw large companies deafening in trying this (remember Karma drone from GoPro? )

I wish you all a great 2019 year – full of drones. And if you have any ideas or need help to get your ideas real, feel free to reach out – or share your comments.