Drone brands to show real world value and prove they are not just flights on fantasy
Drones have seemingly gone from being a cool, innovative novelty to the precursor to a dystopian future; the challenge for the industry then is to work out how unmanned vehicles (UAV) fit into peoples’ lives so that if someone were to hear one above they wouldn't think the worst, reports John McCarthy and Seb Joseph.
Better video quality, longer flight times and lower price tags might be coming to the tech over the next 12 months but to call 2016 the year drones will take off is premature. Regulation aside, the industry is still young and as such hasn’t convinced the masses of their worth, an issue UAV experts from GoPro, Southern Company, Matternet and Uplift Aeronautics partially blamed on the media while at the same time acknowledging that they needed to play the PR game a lot better.
“It’s about working out how great press can translate to people’s everyday lives so that if I’m in my neighbourhood and I hear a buzzing above does it mean that someone is checking on me,” said Paola Santana co-founder and head of network operations at drone delivery startup Matternet at CES.
“It’s why before we fly [goods on behalf of our customers] we make sure that their community knows what we’re doing.”
Her business aims to let people use drones to transport goods using an app that does all the piloting and most of the mission planning itself. All the user has to do is tell the drone where to go and then the drone works out the best route that will fly around sensitive areas like schools and no fly zones. However, the engineering, political and corporate costs involved with running a business like this - let alone the marketing spend - are heavy, which was why fellow drone fliers Uplift Aeronautics was forced to dismantle itself at the turn of the year. The business was launched to pull humans from the sky and still deliver humanitarian aid in conflict places like Syria, where the unmanned vehicles fly small packets of medicine, food and other supplies to people.
Consequently, it’s going to take considerable investment from the industry to educate people of the benefits of drones, whether it’s smarter delivery options, better pictures or humanitarian aid. And that’s before companies work out how to make it more accessible so that people can buy a drone and immediately start flying it without the need to read through pages of an instruction manual.
The UAV industry, while small, is populated by software and hardware vendors working with a variety of companies across land management, construction and energy, which will likely serve as conduits to boost awareness the more they invest. Despite this growth and being one of the standout technologies at CES, drones are still yet to capture the public's imagination in the same way as the internet of things or VR. Annual sales of drones are tipped to reach 120,000 in the US by 2020 according to the Association of Unmanned Vehicles International, whereas sales of connected devices, spurred by a well-oiled hype machine, are forecasted to make $490bn by 2019.
It’s a challenge GoPro is looking to tackle before it releases its first UAV camera later this year so that people can immediately start flying it from the moment they take it out of the box.
“On the photography side drones are hard to operate for the user at the moment,” said Pablo Lema, director of aerial products at GoPro.
“The challenge for us as an industry is to unlock peoples’ desires to use the products through a much shorter process. Autonomy, sub-autonomy, sensors, ect doesn’t matter to the user. They want to see their life and capture it and not have to do much to do it. We need to get to that level of sophistication.”
Beyond firms like Go Pro pushing the market forward, there’s still regulation, which is likely to not be finalised until 2019 at the latest. Both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the UK have strict limitations upon UAV’s, each doling out heavily restrictive licenses to brands testing and utilising the tech.
Airspace rules are in place for good reason, David Bush, co-founder and head of industrial inspections at drone-network Future Aerial argued, stating that “rushing the regulation could lead to incidents that will ruin it for us all”.
Bush told The Drum that for drones to win over the legislators (and the wider public) developers will have to “keep pushing the boundaries of what the technology can do” ensuring that it can be implemented safely in congested areas. It is then important that “the successes and benefits that commercial drones will bring are clearly communicated to the public for them to be fully accepted.”