My four takes on the future of drones

I have always been fascinated by drones – officially known as uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV), and how they are becoming increasingly more part of our world and airspace. Today they are everywhere – both in personal and commercial environments. Their use cases have skyrocketed beyond the initial hobbyist usage for aerial video and photography. Just looking at the numbers for consumer drone shipments Statista expects them to rise from five million units in 2020 to 9.6 million in 2030.[1]

However, the focus on personal usage is shifting into the corporate world. Some examples are the increasing use of drones and drone technology in defence, safety monitoring, agriculture, smart transportation, and shipping.

Today I want to explore with you four major thoughts I have around drones and how I want to shape the global drone journey with Frequentis.

First: Drones will become a commodity in all business areas

In the next few years drones will become even more versatile, smarter, and cheaper. This technological development paves the way for very widespread usage. The important thing is to closely observe how value is generated by the drones. What strikes me is that it is not the drone itself per se, that will bring major changes, but the smart combination of the drone and vertical markets (meaning any form of applicable industry). Every vertical will define specific use cases where the drone can help with two things: Increasing efficiency or enabling completely new processes.

We already see new use cases emerging everywhere: Energy companies are using drones to check their power lines and therefore massively reducing manual work or the need for a costly helicopter. Farmers have also started to fly drones over their fields to help manage large agricultural areas for more precise application of pesticides, also resulting in a reduction of chemical usage.

I also see a lot more of our industry partners and clients using drones, for example, the Austrian railway company, ?BB, is researching the use of drones to inspect their railway lines more efficiently (find our press release here). Police, fire fighters and emergency services also leverage the power of drones to vastly increase their situational awareness of incidents. A recent public safety study in Germany shows, that 142 of 181 participants already use drones in their work to protect the public,[2] with the most common use cases in the search for missing people and the investigation of events.

What I see here is that the public transport and public safety industry profit from a combination of two major trends: Firstly, drones can provide massive amounts of valuable data in the form of video feeds and, secondly, they can use modern networks to connect to artificial intelligence applications that can spot irregularities.[3]

In my opinion, use cases that provide quick value for companies (but may not be the most transformative – examples for transformative use cases would be air taxis or drone deliveries) will play out first. More intriguing technologies still require long timelines until they are developed to a degree where they can be approved by government authorities for use. Still, once we see use cases with higher transformative power picking up momentum, they will transform society at its core. Regulators and companies must start to prepare their capability to handle these transformations.

I think this is just the start of a huge wave of use cases for drones; what we see now is just the tip of the iceberg. Once current research projects and trials have led to concrete legislation and regulations (primarily enabling flights beyond the visual line of sight – BVLOS) we will see air taxis and large-scale drone delivery services flood the airspace.

Second: Systems, markets and administration will open up

The airspace is currently operated mostly by Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) who operate in professional, closed systems, only accessible to specific participants that can contribute data. Actors in this domain are mostly government organisations and large enterprises.

When drones come into play, we will see a high number of new airspace participants, for example transport companies or utility companies, who will operate their own drones. The aviation domain previously required larger investments, which made it relatively unattractive to smaller companies; the industry will open due to the low costs of drone usage. This will generate high volumes of air traffic requiring authorisation and traffic management. Administrations should therefore try to scale up their established processes and systems ahead of time.

My prediction is that administrations will need to define and implement open standards and, also, offer low-barrier applications and services for fulfilling these standards for e.g., flight planning and automated flight approvals in order to reduce the effort for handling this traffic.

I already observed such developments in countries where you can register your drone flights via easy-to-use smartphone apps such as the US is starting to roll out - which is currently still a manual process in most countries.

To be able to do open their systems, administrations need to utilise state of the art, cloud-based, scalable systems and adopt standardised operational procedures, which will take quite some time. This should also be started early to prepare and plan for initial deployments.

Third: Convergence of airspaces will increase

The airspace for drones and planes is currently segregated, with ANSPs using UTM (uncrewed traffic management) systems for drones and ATM (air traffic management) systems for crewed aviation. ?But key to enabling drones to scale and support all potential use cases is the safe integration between the two, allowing real-time information sharing, automatic flight approvals or denials.

At Frequentis we think that the barriers of segregated airspaces will and must be overcome to cope with the huge increase of drone usage. The capacity to connect in real-time and enable quick and high-quality information sharing between ATM and UTM are the keys to breaking down the barrier between ATM/UTM and overcoming the difficulty of integrating drones close to an airport.

As an example: A SWIM (system-wide information management)-based data sharing platform would enable the creation of a safe and secure connection layer for ATM, UTM, and other stakeholders such as airport, police, or search-and-rescue agencies. By combining the strengths of a UTM platform with widely utilised and regulatory approved digital ATM solutions, like electronic flight strips and aeronautical message handling systems, safe and efficient integration will be enabled – for any aircraft, in any airspace and at any time.

But drones will also drive another convergence: I believe that public safety providers will start to use services provided by ANSPs, maybe even start to utilise the same systems, because they want their drones also integrated into the airspace. So, the two classical domains ATM and UTM - which the airspace is currently split into - will converge (even across industries).

Fourth: Drones will supercharge decentralisation

Let’s put the discussed factors together: more drones, a stronger network, low-cost infrastructure platforms. What do we see? More and more distributed physical systems – a new form of the internet of things – a very exciting development!

Let me give you an example: In a recent research project, a drone flying in southern Europe was controlled by a pilot located in northern Europe, managed by a UTM system in Austria. These systems were connected via high performance networks, including initial 5G test setups.

Drones will be on standby, in decentralised infrastructure but connected to the internet. Different systems and stakeholders will be able to utilise those drones. They will provide a hypermobile sensor platform, and eventually might even be able to perform tasks – like for example flying robotic arms. This will create similar advantages to those offered by distributed IT systems. Just this year the company Euroset presented a mobile extracorporeal life support (ECLS) system called COLIBRI which can be mounted to drones. These high-tech machines are needed in certain emergency cases and are so bulky and expensive, that they can’t be in every ambulance. Just imagine what impact it would have if some of these mobile ECLS are on standby, distributed in a mega-city and dispatched to emergency cases on demand!

A second example for me are drones building up a local mesh in case of floods or earthquakes where all infrastructure has been destroyed. Many drones can be quickly deployed and build up a P2P network very quickly, providing sensor data, first aid and support logistics in a very challenging environment.

Still there is much in the unknown and only first ideas start to emerge, but I am sure, when this plays out, massive transformations will happen.

How are we at Frequentis addressing drones?

Frequentis currently offers and develops systems and services which address the challenges and ideas laid out in this article. We are proud of our operational cloud deployments which enable ANSPs to transparently manage their drone traffic and integrate it with ATM, while offering seamless approval processes to drone pilots. Building on this operational experience, we are active in research and validation projects, validating new services for current and yet-to-be aviation stakeholders.

In conclusion, the future of drones looks bright!

Summing up for me and Frequentis, drones are one of the major growth topics. I see a great change in the ATM industry but also in the society when this all plays out. We must start now to carefully and safely manage this transformational process.

My sincere thanks to our UTM specialist Thomas Lutz for helping me to structure my thoughts and providing expert knowledge on this exciting topic.

If you want to share your thoughts on drones, feel free to comment under this article or directly contact Thomas Lutz or me.

Norbert Haslacher is CEO of Frequentis AG since April 2015. His experience and extensive knowledge of IT play a key role in the strategic alignment and ongoing development of the Frequentis Group. Under his leadership, Frequentis has driven forward its international business, based on the innovative IT and software-centric product portfolio, as a publicly listed company, paving the way for an even stronger global presence.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234658/worldwide-consumer-drone-unit-shipments/

[2] https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Mediathek/Publikationen/Krisenmanagement/ergebnisbericht-online-befragung-2021-drohnen.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=7

[3] https://www.dronetech.at/portfolio/ki1-oebb-forschungsprojekt/