Application Development for Drones

There has been a tremendous rise in drone technology over the past few years and this has positively affected the cost of these drones. Both enterprises and individual consumers can now purchase very efficient drones at an affordable cost owing to the increasing advancement in the drone technology.

It wouldn't be a misconception of the idea if we begin to assume that drones are here to stay with the increasing technology we are witnessing to in the industry’s early stages. The 15-20% growth in the annual sales of these drones according to statistical analysis by Fortune, is a further proof that this technology is a welcome idea.

The future of this industry will provide us with abundant opportunities to improve or make our lives much easier. However, the industry’s success will greatly be defined by the ability of application developers to develop apps that will enhance the functionality of the drones.

Developing interfaces that are easy to operate by the operators, building of systems that can assist during emergency situations such as fire fighting control are some of the opportunities the drone industry will be offering in the future.

An interesting aspect of the drone technology is the production of the user interface for controllers some of which are capable of running on mobile devices such as iPad, it may also interest you to know that development of applications for drones is not entirely different from developing software for mobile devices.

The next question you would want to ask is, what areas should application developers for drones be dwelling on?

First of, integration of systems is one major area that developers should start looking into for the development of application software for drones.

Another important area for developers to look into is that of automation, according to Skyward’sScott- “drones still have lots of manual functions because the industry is still in its early stages.” the focus of these developers should, therefore, be on how to automate everything about the drones that's been done manually, whether it's in the gathering of data, data analysis, maintenance etc. They should be able to come up with ideas on how to automate every manual function of the drones and developing companies like Pentoz, are already coming up with innovative ideas for better application development for these drones.

There's also the need for these developers to focus on the analytics aspect of the drones. Developing applications that can aid drone users or owners in breaking down the wide range of detailed data collections made by the drones into the exact information required by the users to help their businesses.

For an application’s developing company such as Pentoz to develop apps that will enable a drone to be a successful solution provider, the application needs to meet certain requirements according to Don Weigel, vice president of product at Airware and the requirements are:

1. Minimal training

2. Insurable and Compliant

3. Able to automate difficult and repetitive tasks

4. Reliable and repeatable

5. Integrate with existing software

6. Scale in use cases

7. Create actionable insights

A drone’s functionality, safety and success solution is heavily dependent on the aforementioned requirements according to Weigel.

It can be seen clearly from this article that application developers for drones have a vital role to play in making the drone industry a success. Our company Pentoz is specialized in developing applications that will meet the requirements that will enable drones to become successful solution providers.