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How You Can Securely Share Live Drone Video Feed with Team and Clients

Posted by Utsav Chopra on February 24, 2020 at 2:35am
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FlytNow Guest Link Sharing offers the capability to share live drone video feed and telemetry with teammates and clients.
Scroll down for the step-by-step tutorial.

Remote Private Access to Drone Fleet, Live Video Feed & Telemetry

Enterprises worldwide are scaling their drone operations, as cost-effective drones become available off-the-shelf, and cloud-based SaaS solutions drive intelligent automation. One of the key drivers of drone fleet adoption is the ability for a variety of stakeholders to participate in drone missions. For example, an inspection of a wind turbine may involve on-site visual observers, remote subject-matter experts, safety managers from regional offices, R&D teams from corporate offices, technology partners — and even UAV regulators who seek insights into such missions before granting waivers for unmanned flights.

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Live, remote drone operations thus require not only low-latency, high-quality video feeds, but also the ability to seamlessly share such video streams across people, geographies, devices and networks. In fact, enterprise drone programs tend to involve a variety of drone hardware — including off-the-shelf drones like DJI Mavic 2 Pro, Mavic 2 Enterprise, Matrice 210/210RTK, M600 Pro, etc., for day-to-day operations and custom drones built using DJI A3, Pixhawk or Cube based autopilots with high-end sensors for rare but critical use-cases.

User-level Access to Drone Missions

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Given that privacy and security remain amongst the top concerns in the global drone ecosystem, enterprises have to carefully manage access to drone telemetry, live video streams, navigation, and payloads. With multiple, remote participants in each mission, fine-grained access — based on the roles and responsibilities of each participant — becomes central to successful drone operations.

Guest Link Sharing

It can be argued that many drone operations would be significantly more productive if secure, mission-wise remote viewing can be made available, over the Internet, via a user-friendly interface. Whether it’s a drone service provider monitoring construction sites or whether it’s the in-house drone operations manager supporting his/her colleagues for inspection of infrastructure assets, the access to live video streams — securely & remotely — can create immediate business value by enabling subject-matter experts to make better-informed decisions.

In fact, not only can remote viewers be empowered to access live video feeds in real-time, but remote operators can be given control of the drone, camera gimbal and payloads, with the on-site team serving as safety pilots and visual observers. Automating such live, remote drone operations then becomes the logical next step in the evolution and maturing of enterprise drone programs.

Drone Videos on Mobile Phones

Given the pervasiveness of mobile phones and tablets across businesses in all sectors, it is but natural for drone mission participants to expect these devices to be an integral part of the overall system. This is now easily possible via enterprise-grade mobile apps that can be easily customized, white-labeled and configured — making drone telemetry & videos extremely portable, especially in areas with robust 4G/LTE/5G networks.

Share Live Map Views, Drone Fleet Location, and other Mission-critical Data

Remote access for ‘guest’ participants in drone missions need not be limited to video — since live map views can also be seamlessly shared over the cloud, showing guest viewers the waypoints, flight paths, obstacles, etc. for each mission. Third-party maps can be integrated to overlay drone missions on satellite imagery, specific drones/payloads can provide IR/thermal camera views to remote stakeholders, and missions such as parcel delivery can be remotely monitored not only over the last-mile but all the way to the ‘doorstep’.

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Aerial video streaming is thus becoming the core of drone operations for operators, service providers, system integrators and large enterprises — with secure, user-level access for remote participants the ‘killer app’ of this technology.

Tutorial: How to share live drone video feed and map view using FlytNow

Step 1: Log in to your FlytNow account and connect your drone to the application. Follow the FlytNow getting started guide if you are a first time user.

Step 2: Click on the “Share” icon on the video box or button in the Cockpit view

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Step 3: Click on “Create new link” to generate a link

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Step 4: Enter your teammate’s or client’s valid email address with whom you wish to share video & map view and click “Send”
Note:

  • Choose appropriate options for view and drone access.
  • You may enter multiple email addresses
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Step 5: Teammate or Client receives an email with a link and Secure PIN

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Step 6: Click on the “View Operation” and enter the Secure Pin. Your teammate or client can now securely access live drone feed and telemetry.

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For any questions, you may write to us on info@flytbase.com or visit http://forums.flytbase.com/c/flytnow

How do I Deploy Commercial Drones Easily & Quickly?

FlytBase offers a 28-day free trial for users to explore the FlytNow Pro edition. Customers can add their drone fleets, fly them autonomously, create flight plans & coordinate missions, set geo-fence and checklists, view and store live video footage and integrate drone operations into an existing system.

Start Now and fly your drone(s) via a free trial in 5 Easy Steps.

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Drone Streaming: Real-Time Live Video Feed From Drones for Commercial Applications

Posted by Utsav Chopra on January 29, 2020 at 11:30pm

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The commercial drone industry is rapidly maturing – across industries, geographies, use-cases, and business models – thanks to advances in UAV hardware and regulation. An incredibly rich variety of drone hardware has been built, tested, piloted and deployed for enterprise applications – ranging from ‘nano’ category drones for covert surveillance to large, custom-built drones designed to carry multi-kg payloads for last-mile e-commerce delivery. 

Nevertheless, a large percentage of commercial use-cases involving drones revolve around the ‘eye in the sky’ capability – making live, high-quality video feeds from drones a key capability of enterprise-grade solutions. With the recent advances in AI/ML technology, the data captured by the drones’ camera can then be automatically processed – in the specific context of that use-case – to derive insights and make informed business decisions.

Live Video Streaming from Drones

Live views of an environment, asset, person, etc. – enabled by drones – are central to use-cases such as situational awareness during natural disasters, inspections of wind turbines and solar farms, intruder detection at secure sites, etc. Drones that stream live video are expected to augment, if not replace, humans as well as fixed monitoring equipment such as CCTVs – driven by their ability to use the 3D space, be remotely operated, carry payloads, be deployed in fleets, and made fully autonomous.

Video from Remote Drone Operations

In use-cases such as public safety, drones can provide live video streams to the emergency operators centers and help accelerate the incident response. In the security & surveillance context, drones can be operated remotely to capture live video, thus preventing humans from being put at risk.

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Firefighters can deploy drone fleets all around the incident site to get a 360 degree, real-time video feed and thus employ the most suitable equipment and tactics to control the fire while minimizing safety risks.

From Drone Video Streams To Remote Drone Control

The latency of live video feeds from drones has been brought down to the 500-ms level, and the latency of drone telemetry is in fact much lower at 50ms. Enterprises can thus not only rely on near-real-time video feeds (with quality as high as 4K) from drone fleets – but they can even incorporate remote control of the drone and camera gimbal, into their workflows. Subject-matter experts, for example, need no longer go to the site for asset inspections; instead, they can control the drone from a corporate office, using the live video feed as immediate feedback, saving time, effort and expenses – and improving worker safety at the same time!

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A variety of remote stakeholders can thus easily access drone videos simultaneously – with only the drone pilot/operations manager having to be physically on-site. In fact, varying levels of access can be designed to telemetry, images, videos and sensor data – thus ensuring data privacy and security, while empowering the right stakeholders to fulfill their roles in the context of enterprise drone operations.

Enhancing Live Video Streams from Drones

With the availability of cost-effective off-the-shelf drones and airframes, as well as a wide variety of payloads, drone solution providers are crafting the optimal solutions for commercial use-cases. The software of course plays a vital role in enabling drone stakeholders to plan, execute, log, monitor and repeat drone missions; the software will also be crucial in maturing most drone operations from manual to fully autonomous.

However, drone payloads such as thermal cameras, IR cameras, sirens, lights, camera gimbals, charging pads, etc. also are crucial for delivering value. Live video streams from dual cameras in drones can power night-time missions, while the ability to record video streams (on local servers or on the cloud) can support the investigation of security incidents and audits of security services.

Insights from Video Streams from Drones

The rich, real-time image and video data captured by drone cameras serve as a rapidly increasing repository of ‘training data’ for AI/ML algorithms to use as part of intelligent automation of enterprise automation. For example, live video feeds from drones that monitor industrial premises can be complemented with trained AI/ML models that can automatically detect humans, animals, and objects – and trigger security alarms. Similarly, video streams from public safety situations can be automatically analyzed to aid emergency response teams to identify suspects and/or victims in that context. Drone solution providers are in fact rapidly building capabilities to automatically detect weeds, pests, crops, cattle, etc. – with high-quality video data from drone fleets as the key enabler.

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