UAV Expo – A Growing Industry That’s Growing Up!
Anonym
This year’s UAV Expo had a strong agenda featuring a mix of
sessions and speakers representing multiple commercial markets. Breakout
sessions included electric utilities, oil and gas, infrastructure, agriculture,
insurance and civil markets. The sessions featured a solid mix of
industry use cases, drone platforms, and service providers, including software
for image analytics. For the record, I fit into the latter category -- full
disclosure!
I attended this same event a year ago, so I thought it might
be useful to compare and contrast the noticeable changes from one year to the
next.
Overall: Drones are still on the rise, but analytics and
end products matter more than ever.
Drones and more drones appear on the floor every year. It is
always great to see the latest and greatest. A few things jumped out this
year and it happened in the opening session when DJI brought up some of their
key stats including surpassing $1B in sales. The other item of interest
wasn’t so much discussed, but was the fact that UAV Commercial bought out the
Drone Expo and next year the show will be even bigger.
Remote sensing applications continue to evolve as do the
business models
While there are plenty of drones out flying around, data
being collected still seems to be all over the map. Sensor information and
capability is key to the project. Do you have the right sensor for the right
project and does it align to your business model? I had some good
discussions about merging satellite imagery with UAV imagery, as well as about
processing imagery to make sure the end product you produce is accurate and
useful.
Utilities and Agriculture have solid use cases and
results
A few speakers were bold enough to state that while drones
are great, the data is the product and the analytics on the image provides the true
value. I found this interesting since many service providers are reaching
out to their customers and pitching flights, but the buyer is not just buying
the flight. They also require quality data that is suitable for processing and
analysis to gain insights. This is a big difference from the year before where
the speakers spent time talking about the value of drones in industry and now
they are talking about the need to deliver analytics and deep learning and
answers! This is particularly true for agriculture where the panel all agreed
that they need to go beyond just analytics and get into predictive modelling
when possible. I suspect that will continue to be a growing theme in the
year to come.