Drones at the NASA event: key topics and enablers
In late July I attended the NASA event with my colleague Biren Gandhi (give a read to his blog here), where we gave a demonstration about using Cisco Collaboration technology to enable economically viable drone services.
That was a great event, since you could really feel a vibrant energy from industry, regulatory bodies and research centers in the direction of identifying a viable path to integrate drones in the managed flight system.
The same push that, I think, had some weight in the decision the California's governor took to put a veto on the bill to ban unmanned vehicles from flying 350 feet above property without express consent of property owners.
So I decided to take same time and share my opinions about some drone related key topics that I got at NASA event, in following weeks and that I'm experiencing in person.
Drones are not going to fly above cities and "critical spaces" anytime soon
Well, this is a bold statement and of course there will be some exceptions I guess. But main point I could get among many discussion is that before 2019 it will be unlikely to see any regular service of drones delivering boxes to your house.
This is what I got in the presentation Parimal Kopardekar from NASA gave about his vision of the integration of drones into national flight system management.
On top of this, lots of discussions/issues related to privacy, that, in my view, can delay even more drone services in densely populated areas.
Beyond line of sight flights are more achievable
…or at least I left the NASA event with a more positive feeling about BLOS, since, still in Kopardekar presentation, BLOS was addressed as part of Build 2, targeted for October 2016.
On top of this several flight planning solutions have been presented by different companies. This means, in my opinion, that we will be able, in a reasonable amount of time, to "reserve" our operational space for the drone to fly and so, guarantee a certain level of security and the possibility to operate BLOS.
I strongly believe this is as relevant for agrotech and field inspection (in not populated areas) as it is for flying a drone over a city. As a matter of fact, inspecting a oil pipeline or performing a photogrammetry exercise on a large crop area is somewhat difficult (and maybe not economically viable) if you have to do hop-by-hop with the pilot and team moving along the drone path.
The market is ready and waiting
In past months I met quite a few people from several verticals asking for drones enabled services, but at the NASA conference I was really surprised and interested listening to the speeches of states and local administration. Georgia, Illinois and New York state representative, among others, are just the first, coming to my mind now, to see opportunities and business associated to drones.
This is another sign (if there was the need for) that market is ready and waiting for regulation to finally allow services to start.
What we shared at the NASA event – It's all about Collaboration, Fog Computing and IoE
Well, I do not want to say too much, since I'd love you to check on Cisco blog, but definitively Cisco message was clear: drones are enablers and are going to be connected devices.
As such, they're going to generate a huge amount of data that is needed when you enable services such as precision agriculture, 3D mapping, field inspection etc. Gigabytes or even Terabytes of data shall have to be parsed, transferred, processed in cloud (likely) and converted in digestible content for customers (e.g. farmers, surveillance companies, architects, oil and environment engineers etc). More, many of these services will need multiple experts to work together to achieve their scope, including to plan a remote flight between a local pilot and a agrotech expert.
So you will need to create an economically sustainable ecosystem that can glue in all needed resources and expertise: that is all about Collaboration, Fog Computing, Could and IoE and guess what?
In other words, It's all about Cisco.