Drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are undergoing a dramatic transformation as they evolve from expensive toy to critical business tool. Fitted with sensors and miniature cameras, these unpiloted aircraft are being pressed into service in many industries – scanning agriculatural land and spraying pesticides, making movies, searching for survivors in disaster-hit areas, and detecting leaks in oil and gas pipelines to name just a few.

We have lift off

A whole new industry is on the verge of taking off, said Michael Perry, a spokesman for DJI Global, a startup that builds drones for both commercial and consumer applications. “Big businesses are finding uses for drones in providing information in areas that were previously inaccessible or just not cost-effective to assess in person or by helicopter,” he said.

Drones are able to put cameras and sensors in places where humans can’t go themselves – or at least not without huge expenses involved. Perhaps the most obvious case is in visual inspection – being able to survey land and industrial installations from the air, without needing to invest in expensive helicopters and aircraft and train people to fly them. In agriculture, for example, a number of companies are already exploring the use of drones to inspect fields from different angles and at different times of the year, an arduous task for humans on the ground.

The below footage shows a banana plantation in Calinan, Davao City, in the Philippines, being inspected by a UAV. The plantation can be examined quickly and the video footage will be used by farmers to analyze the growth and health of vegetation for planning nutrient and pesticide applications.

Chris Mailey, vice-president of knowledge resources and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle System International (AUVSI), told IndustrialInternet.com that precision agriculture would become one of the biggest markets for drones in the not-too-distant future. UAVs fitted with infrared light cameras are able to monitor the growth of a specific field section and reveal plant health by reflecting how efficient photosynthesis is in various plants. Drones can also identify precisely where resources such as pesticides, water or fertilizers are needed, Mailey said. In Japan, Yamaha has been doing this for years because much of the country’s agricultural land is mountainous.

The use of drones as an eye in the sky will impact more than just the agricultural industry though, said DJI Global’s Perry. Other uses include delivering Internet connectivity, surveying buildings and houses, smoke stack inspection, power/pipeline inspection, stockpile assessment and roofing, to name just a few. “Drones will impact numerous other areas where aerial perspectives were either impossible, costly or dangerous,” Perry said.

But drones will be capable of doing much more than just aerial observations – in addition to cameras, they can also be fitted with non-optical sensors to carry out various monitoring tasks in difficult-to-reach locations with less cost and more precision than is possible with manned vehicles.

“The information collected by drones helps businesses make more precise decisions about where they need to take action – whether it’s where to add fertilizer or decrease watering of crops or to clearly identify the location of a fault in a large solar panel field,” Perry said.

Drones will also be able to help with the heavy lifting. One of the sexiest ideas was touted by Amazon.com, which last year announced plans to use drones to deliver merchandise directly to people’s homes, and it’s an idea that Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba is also keen to adopt. Nevertheless, delivery drones are more likely to be a longer-term application of UAVs, says Daniel Lubrich, Co-founder of Krossblade Aerospace Systems LLC, a maker of drones and light, manned aircraft.

“Autonomous delivery is still a long term application that may require some problem solving first,” Lubrich said in an interview. “It has huge potential, but still requires solving the problems of how packages are actually dropped, and how they will operate in difficult environments like high rise buildings.”

While Amazon’s engineers struggle with these challenges, other industries will likely take the initiative, says Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research. Mueller believes that one of the most powerful applications for drones will actually be indoors. Drones will be used to transport smaller objects inside buildings and industrial facilities, he said, effectively becoming part of the internal mail department. Warehousing and product picking will be revolutionized too, as drones are expected to be cheaper than automated rack management systems.

“Uneven ground, elevators and especially stairs have been a challenge most robots cannot overcome,” Mueller said. “Take it to the air and it gets much easier to fetch and deliver an object inhouse.”

The sky’s the limit

Few people are questioning the viability of drones, but regulation remains a big question. As it stands right now, the use of drones for commercial purposes is illegal in the United States, unless special permission is granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

It won’t always be this way though. The FAA has given itself a deadline of September 2015 to create a consistent legal framework governing the commercial use of drones (though it may miss that deadline) and has proposed a number of rules that are now up for public discussion. The FAA’s proposed rules state that drones must stay in a visual line-of-sight of the operator, yield to other aircraft, not drop objects, not operate in the nighttime, have aircraft markings, and not exceed 100 mph or an altitude of 500 feet. It would also require that all drone operators pass an aeronautical test at an FAA-approved center and be screened by the Transportation Security Administration.

If those rules seem pretty strict, that’s because they are. But the FAA has already shown some leniency, removing an original proposal that all operators must possess a commercial pilot’s license before they’re able to take a drone to the skies, and Constellation Research’s Mueller believes the rules will loosen up more before too long.

“Assuming the FAA upholds the line-of-sight mandate for operators, this restricts drone use to a very limited space and very few applications,” Mueller said. “Over time we expect the FAA to relax these rules, which would open up the potential for drones as delivery vehicles, taking to the skies instead of clogging streets.”

And when that happens, there’ll be nothing to stop drones from really taking off, especially when one considers the kind of money the industry could soon be worth. A recent study by the AUVSI predicts drones will have an economic impact of more than $13.6 billion within three years of their integration into U.S. airspace, reaching more than $82 billion and creating over 100,000 jobs by the year 2025, with most of that cash coming from the related services they provide, rather than drone sales alone.

“Drones themselves will get cheaper and cheaper, and surveillance, mail departments and warehouse management are all double-digit billion expenses for enterprises – so the drones business will take its cut out of them,” Mueller said. “We think a double-digit billion figure in the twenties of this century is very plausible.”

Image credits: Succo via Pixabay.com / featured image via PBS.org