Using Drone Technology to Solve Business Challenges

As the Managing Director of a global drone services company, I’m encouraged by how commercial drone technology is increasingly used to solve existing business problems that most people never considered problems.

Over the last several years, autonomous flight technology has been enhanced even further with artificial intelligence and machine learning. I am beyond fascinated by the possibilities.

Drones can present some noteworthy challenges from a societal perspective, but my core interest revolves around the business applications surrounding this technology. Though a drone is basically an aircraft, that’s not how I think.

Aerial photography is just the start

When I think about a drone, my initial thought is…it’s a damn good camera! Most drones have a three-axis gimbal and can be mounted with a high-quality zoom lens, advanced optics, and an accurate sensor that’s probably superior to most smartphones. Professional commercial drones typically shoot 4K video as raw files, with 120 frames per second and HDR (High Dynamic Range) frame rates. So yes…it’s a damn good camera.

Drones represent a stacked technology platform

But even more interesting is that drones are stacked technology platforms.

What I find really cool when you boot-up a drone is that first noise that you hear, the noise are the fans spinning up to cool the microprocessor running this device. There’s an awful lot of onboard heavy lifting (no pun intended) taking place to control tracking GPS and stabilizing flights.?

It's mind-blowing that this device can follow pre-programmed trajectories autonomously (utilizing mission-building software such as DroneDeploy). Most people consider just the airframe (better known as “the drone”), but it’s really only 50% of the technology platform.

The remaining technology is the controller, an intelligent device cradled in your hands. Most controllers are designed to accept a smartphone or tablet, extending their capability by leveraging their processing power. The phone also provides internet connectivity, which provides access to hundreds of cloud technology applications, creating a quasi-end-to-end computing stack.

The impact of drone aerial data on industry

Among all the industries and activities where object detection is poised to make a significant impact, drone services are undoubtedly near the top.?With advanced techniques such as object detection, there really is no limit to what they can do. Aerial data collection and the valuable business insights derived from these unmanned aerial systems are rapidly improving dozens of industry workflows by automating the data extraction process using human and artificial intelligence integration.

With more and more businesses relying on location data or “geo-tagging” to optimize their operations and planning, the commercial drone services market continues to be on the cutting edge. Drone mapping service providers who continue to embrace connecting these core technologies will become the stewards and thought leaders for geospatial aerial intelligence for years.

Diverse requirements for drones

Businesses and industries needing geospatial analytics are increasingly varied and have diverse requirements.

Here are just a few examples:

• Agricultural farmers must know how many of their crops are under-productive and the crop count for harvest yield.
• Ranchers need to know how many heads of cattle, pigs, or even horses survive after a flood.
• The insurance industry needs to know how many roofs and structures were damaged during a storm and to what extent.
• Utility and energy companies need to know how many transmission lines are down and where the hot spots are in a city.
• Oil and Gas companies must detect oil spills and gas leaks to protect the environment and mitigate years of ecosystem damage.

All of these businesses need to tag and archive the location of each object they are tracking. They all share a common metric, one that can be the difference between their business bouncing back or being completely wiped out: time.

Assessing the damage quickly after a natural disaster is critical for monetary purposes. Even more importantly, it can be critical to human survival in many cases. The applications and use cases for artificial intelligence-driven technologies are virtually endless.

Drones can exceed human limitations

Let’s explore drones and aerial data collection from a workforce multiplier perspective.

Drones entered the commercial space as exciting recreational toys. They have slowly transformed into a multi-billion-dollar industry with countless commercial applications ranging from asset inspections to military surveillance.

Artificial Intelligence, with its recent advancements and disruptive technology, has been a game changer for the UAS industry. AI opened doors to unimaginable possibilities just a few years ago.

Drones can serve multiple purposes, leveraging various technologies such as visual search, image recognition, object detection, and tracking. Drones with AI-powered technology can detect objects faster and more efficiently than humans. With the advancement of algorithm-based machine learning, drones can cover large areas and spot thousands of objects in the blink of an eye.

Drones can improve data accuracy

In addition to the scale at which it can operate, AI can also improve detection accuracy. AI-enhanced drones mimic the human visual search mindset to detect and identify people and objects as humans do.

Even the most meticulous person is bound to make mistakes while carrying out monotonous manual detection on a large scale. This is where automation helps by learning features and performing the same steps accurately every time they are executed. This allows human expertise to focus on more challenging and rare features.

Drones can also facilitate mapping and cartography services (the science of making maps). Building maps might require appointing a specialist or an expert team to get into an area that is impossible to explore or dangerous to humans. But a drone-based solution—fueled by AI—will enable devices to work independently. They can facilitate creating a damage detection map by scanning roads, bridges, and construction sites and delivering all the data to the local data processing center.

Drones are a workforce multiplier

Until recently, aerial data collection consisted of manually extracting image data features, anomalies, and locations. Though thought to be better than ground truthing, this process was time-consuming and costly to scale up.

While the process could be automated by hiring highly specialized professionals—such as machine learning experts, computer vision specialists, and data scientists—this is not a feasible investment for small and medium-sized drone service businesses. A cost-effective solution to automate the feature extraction process and increase the geospatial analysis production capacity is to use AI object detection.

Not only can AI improve the accuracy of a project, but it can also dramatically reduce the time to delivery. The entire workload of mapping, detecting, and extracting data can last up to days if done manually. Instead, automated machine learning detection can execute faster with the power of artificial intelligence, shortening the delivery time from days to minutes. Objects such as trees, animals, solar panels, shipping containers, or buildings could be simple algorithms to craft for object detection. You can then combine what program you need with what situation you need to tackle by using automated software such as?Kubernetes?to keep on top of workload outputs.

Real-world examples of drone-based AI object detection workflow

The same heavy workload repeated with every project requires more cost and labor intensity to deliver the results on time. In contrast, once created, automated detection can be executed repeatedly, without additional cost, at a much faster pace.

Integrating AI into the process can reduce the overall timespan, which translates directly into cost savings. You can also export the detections as georeferenced layers in various formats optimized to match your workflow on any GIS software.

Some examples and use cases for UAS object detection include:

Roofs

Up-to-date detections give local governments and insurance companies insights into discrepancies in declared values and a correct parameter.

Vehicles

Local governments can use drones to plan parking infrastructure and road network adaptations. Real estate agencies can use drones to spot and assess the most frequently visited areas.

Roadmarks

Up-to-date detections provide key insights to local infrastructure and traffic agencies or insurance companies when analyzing traffic accidents' geographic prevalence and distribution. Moreover, this supports efficient road marking maintenance planning.

Solar Panels

Determining solar panel prevalence and geolocation can unlock key market insights for energy companies and manufacturers. Optimized management of the supply and demand of renewable energy also requires up-to-date information on the solar panel locations.

Trees

Locating trees near critical assets provides insurance companies with valuable risk assessment information. Detecting trees encroaching buffer zones is also key to infrastructure planning, such as gas pipelines or overhead power lines.

Conclusion

Object detection in drone services goes far beyond aerial photography and videography.?

Many industries use drones to assist with important tracking, management, and inventory-related issues in places like warehouses and even on construction sites. A drone service with object detection can not only help create a grid-based location of assets at any given moment but can also provide insight into asset check-in and check-out, inventory location, reporting, authorizing yard activity, and more.

It’s easy to see why object detection is so important for drone services. With it, you can focus less on the drone and more on your business objective. It’s one of the purest examples of using technology to support and empower humans instead of replacing them. This is an important business trend that will continue in significance over time.

View the original article on the Volatus Unmanned Services website.