Good article at The Atlantic's Quartz site comparing DJI with 3DR. Sample quote:
The UAV industry is a fairly new one, and right now its main focus is on consumer products. That’s partially because it is growing from a consumer base: What has made them possible is the smartphone revolution, which drove down the price on the tiny electronic components needed to turn low-power remote control aircraft into flying robots that navigate, communicate, and sense. While defense contractors were making expensive and powerful drones for the US military, hobbyists were basically bolting iPhones onto remote-controlled helicopters.
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Oh, about the mention of a patent above. I don't want to look like a hypocrite for bashing patents, and then talking about filing one. The goal wouldn't be to stop others from doing it, so much as to prevent someone else from suing me. I would much prefer there were no patents at all. But if they exist, you have to use them to protect yourself.
If there is interest on doing a public domain collection patents on UA ideas, I'll throw that in the mix, just to keep Giant Corporation A from stepping on a lot of work and money I might spend.
Competition in the marketplace is great. Competition in the court room stinks.
Agriculture is surely one of the first really big industrial sectors for UAs. Film is high dollar, but probably not as large (in numbers of vehicles) as AG, merely because the world has so MANY acres of farm land, and you have to work them year after year.
The obvious is NDVI (photography again) and I've read it's already being done in Europe. I suspect there would be additional value in very low altitude NDVI. The last two years I've flown a regular aircraft shooting these images, from at least 1000 feet, but often from 3-5 thousand. You can pick out crop stress in larger sections of a field from that altitude, but there is a need sometimes to find the single plant that has been initially infested with some critter. If you fly really low, this might be done. If these individual plants can be targeted quickly, it can sometimes be possible to avoid spraying a whole field. These chemicals cost a lot of money, so the savings might be huge, not to mention any ecological impact.
The uses in AG are nearly limitless.
For example, I've been told it's important to know EXACTLY the size of Lettuce heads when they are approximately tennis ball size. I've forgotten the details, but there is a chemical application, and knowing exactly when, and how much, to apply is important. Amounts can vary across the field, so collecting data quickly across a whole field and using it for "precision farming" can be valuable.
Something I haven't researched, but I wonder if a UA could "smell" the air around a crop and determine conditions. Fly it really low and sample the air. You might be able to measure a lot of stuff you couldn't by any other method.
It's already common to send people out on four-wheelers to "soil sample" fields. They have a GPS, and physically take some dirt, labeled with location, and test it in an office. So, could you zap dirt from a UA with a powerful laser, do spectral analysis on the vapor, and come back with a map of the whole field in minutes? That might be cool, as long as you didn't call the company "Cyberdyne Systems".
I've got another specific AG application I'm sitting on until I can get it patented. It may not be the biggest app in the world, but maybe worth while anyway, depending on some crop research now underway.
The exact details of what you can do in AG varies with every crop, and part of the world. But I suspect nearly all of them could use the technology when UAs are cheap and dead easy to use, and the processing software gets sophisticated enough.
Using LIDAR in survey airplanes is already common to collect DEM information (Digital Elevation Models). But UAs could be dramatically more precise, because they could fly much lower. People worry that these things will be used to look into their back yard. But what's wrong with using this to map out land prior to earth work, perhaps for a new highway, or building excavation? Rather than sending a guy with a GPS on a pole to walk the whole lot, you might get much more data resolution with a UA and LIDAR.
I knew a guy once in the 80's that used stereo images shot from an airplane of an open pit mine to build DEM data. They wanted to know how much they had mined, so he did this every week.
So when a construction company is doing earth work, they might want to know exactly what they've accomplished each day. How much more dirt must they move from point A to B? How much is soil being compacted when it's moved, or not compacted?
Add imaging to the above and RTK GPS precision, and with some really tricky software you might be able to "survey" an area virtually. Fly over it and log all the data, then next week someone sitting in an office in Bangalore could pick out a physical spot on their computer monitor, just like a surveyor in the field putting down a pole on a marker, and determine exactly the markers location in 3D, probably within 2-3cm. It would be impossible to "miss" a spot you need, because you have 3D information of every square inch of the area. You just go back in the virtual data and pick it out.
This isn't far fetched. I've seen it done with GPS and 3D imaging shot from a car. But a UA can go where a car can't, go over rough ground much smoother, and it won't damage the ground.
More ideas:
Surveying the condition of structures, like the underside of bridges (no doubt this is already done somewhere).
This gets back into the police field, but search and rescue could make good use of UAs. With short duration flight times, it might be the most practical to send out a half dozen UAs, record video of the whole environment with a search pattern, then post process automatically, or with a human. It seems people get lost up here in the mountains where I live 3 or 4 times a year, and often they don't survive.
More?
Ultimately the topics of regulation and patents are only a short term concern. We are moments away from printing (or growing) our own MEMS IMUs, batteries, motors, etc.
The future is about raw materials and knowledge.
Landfill mining tech will be a big business, second only to knowledge and learning structures.
Morality is going to be an all or nothing issue. It's impossible for us to have a continued technical evolution and maintain our destructive desires.
I start to work on drone technology 5 years ago . This year in Italy ENAC the Italian FAA open the commercial market , so we creating a startup company that put togheter best guys that i know in italy in last 5 years of development. I think that the drone will be a big opportunity for future commercial market and opportunity . The huge market is in filmography , aeropicture and survey .
Best
Roberto Navoni
We are proactively working with our elected officials to keep heavy-handed legislation away from small UAV’s, specifically for use in the agricultural industry. Last Friday we met with our local state senator to explain the potential UAV’s can play in agriculture in Kansas. He is assisting us by suggesting a plan for us to meet with our congressmen and governor to also explain the roll small UAV’s using aerial imagery can play in agriculture in Kansas.
Soon we will meet with our elected officials so they can touch, hold and feel a foam-flying wing, which weighs less than seven pounds when fully outfitted for agronomy work. We will explain how agricultural missions can be managed and the benefits to the farmers.
I believe if elected officials can understand the concept of small UAV’s as well as the benefits to farmers, they will be in a better position to protect their use from difficult legislation.
With this thought in mind, I encourage others to also meet with your elected officials so they can understand what a small UAV is as well as their capabilities to benefit the public.
Also, to your previous comment-- the patent threat to SteadiDrone is not credible and would be immediately thrown out if challenged. The owner of that patent logged into these forums in order to issue a legal threat and was immediately drowned out with numerous prior art citations by other posters. It's ridiculous and that patent has no legs to stand on.
One of the very nice things about this field is that most of the 'general' stuff is public domain due to its age. The only big invention on the basic model of the last decade has been driven by miniaturization of electronic components, in turn driven by the adoption of smartphones.
Dennis, given sufficient visible commercial and social value, society will strike a balance of permission and restraint. The real issue is how that value is demonstrated -now-, in order to elicit the balanced consideration it requires. The problem is that this value is developing haphazardly, is unfocused, the industry is generally clueless and too narrowly focused on the law enforcement/military applications that the public despise, and it's just all so damn new that there's little window of opportunity for it to develop before the restrictions come. (Or before someone does something stupid.)
Just to be clear: of course I believe we end up with legal UAVs--the real question is who gets to use them. My prediction is that it won't be unlicensed operators, and it won't be cheap or easy to get a license. I think the hobbyist sphere will end up being restrained by altitude and/or geographic constraints, and require compliance in order to limit thrust and capabilities. Basically, these things will be nano-range toys for unlicensed users. If the FAA doesn't pass something sweeping to this effect, municipalities will.
Again, the issue here is the mobility. There's big potential for the technology's spread/application, but it's tangled up in security, privacy and airspace integration issues. The PC or CB or whatever else had none of those problems. These things severely curtail the number and types of UAVs that will be deployed, and manufacturers focused on serving the micro-UAV hobbyist market are going to have to adapt or die.
This thread kicks ass.
One strategy, I haven't seen mentioned specifically, is the education arena. Robots need to become a fundamental part of math and science curriculum for students of all ages. There is no better way to "normalize" a technology than through adoption by the next generation.
Crude has a good point on security.
Yes, anything that can be used as a weapon, will be used as a weapon.
If you can use a microprocessor in a missile warhead, they will be used. If you can spy on the actions of someone with a computer virus, it will be done.
The defense against something like that destroying the industry is to make the device so ubiquitous that it becomes unthinkable to eliminate it, just because someone used it as a weapon. No one would make microprocessors or computer illegal just because they were used for evil.
In other words, go big, or go home.
The GPS industry could have been hit like that 15 years ago, IF someone had used a GPS guided device in such a visible way (the military DOES use such things, but the military is a tiny fraction of the commercial GPS market).
But if someone used a GPS that way today, it would be impossible to make GPS illegal. I mean, does anyone still know how to survey land anymore without a GPS?
I spent the last 10 years building GPS guidance systems for farm tractors that included automatic steering. At any time, someone could have welded plate steel around a CAT D7 with one of our systems and sent it through the capitol building. Either with, or without explosives, it would make a mess. But, nobody did it, and nearly all new farm tractors have such things today. I doubt laws would be passed to make them illegal just because someone used them badly, because it would make a large disruption in the industry.
So protect against it by finding lots of OTHER good things to use UAs for, and get a market started for them.
I can come up with ideas like Robin Williams throwing out laugh lines on Johnny Carson. The problem is patent law.
I detest patents with a passion. I have a few in my name, but I've also been in a company sued over a patent (we won, after $3million spent for lawyers).
In the PC revolution, it was common knowledge (not quite true, but we didn't know it) that you couldn't patent software. So to compete, everybody came out with products as fast as they could, resulting in a huge competitive explosion. That changed with a ruling about 15 years ago, and a great many things have become difficult since then.
For example, I saw a video from the SteadiDrone folks in South Africa, where they mention they've already been pinged by patent trolls on their hinged copter arms.
Patent law is supposed to only cover inventions that are "not obvious to one trained in the art". So, how much "invtenting" did it take to put a hinge on a copter arm? I mean, duh. Hinges were invented centuries ago, and you can put them on anything.
Patent law will take a serious turn on March 16 of this year. On that date the policy of "first to file" will take effect. If I understand this correctly, someone on this board could come up with a good idea and write about it. Then some major corporation can get a patent on it, regardless that someone else "invented" it, and even published it.
Perhaps what should happen is a Kickstarter project to come up with as many "inventions" as possible in this area, and get them filed ASAP. They would be public domain, filed merely to prevent someone else from "inventing" the obvious.
After that, everybody in the pool!
I'm working on a couple of genuine commercial applications now. One, I've read is being done in Europe. The other, not.
The second relies on RTK GPS (google it) and LIDAR. Of course, someone can file a patent on putting RTK and LIDAR on a drone, or probably already has, as if that took any real intelligence to come up with. It didn't. (It's like, let's patent putting LIDAR on my butt - measure the distance to my chair - nobody has a patent on that yet, so it's an "invention" - seriously)
The "invention" is really knowing there is a need for something, even if it's something already being done with another technology. Once you know the need, then if you know what RTK and LIDAR does, it's obvious they are a viable solution. To me, that "invention" is obvious to one "trained in the art" of RTK and LIDAR, and shouldn't be patentable.
Just my personal beef.
Anyway... Anyone up for a Kickstarter project to patent everything in sight for small drones that isn't already patented or in production? We'll give rights to some non-profit for public domain use.
You can combine a lot of features into a single patent, even if they're only marginally related. So if we came up with 50 ideas, it might only take two or three filings. Title one "improved UA navigation" and list every conceivable improvement and possible combinations thereof in one document.
I think under current law until March 16, we could list ideas here in public, which would protect them under "first to invent". But patents on them would have to be filed by March 16, or they risk being stolen.
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