‘Smart drones’ are the next frontier for drones
Why?
Robots will dominate and automate all of the dangerous and mundane tasks in the near future.
Some of these tasks are already quite cheaply automated in software. From music sales, travel websites, and online banking, it’s becoming apparent that software bots can automate many mundane, repetitive tasks.
The interesting question is, ‘Why aren’t we seeing more hardware robots in our daily lives?’
“Why aren’t we seeing … robots in our daily lives?”
[1]
For physical robots to become common in our daily lives as a utility, two revolutions must take place:
Revolution 1: Lower cost, highly computationally powered, and smaller components such as sensors and mobile processors must be made available.
Revolution 2: Open, accepted, and straightforward standards for the development of robotics must be established.
These two revolutions will allow physical robots to escape the confines of car factories, beer breweries, and food processing plants and into our skies, homes, and most aspects of our professional and personal lives.
Revolution 1 gives us the hardware, whereas Revolution 2 gives us the software to empower the hardware.
For example, let’s say we want to create a drone which can monitor our home for security purposes. Revolution 1 gives us the tangible hardware such as the sensors, motors, and controller to build the drone. Revolution 2 will give us the tools to either develop the software application or download an existing application built for home security.
“Let’s say we want … a drone which can monitor our home for security”
This is directly analogous to the web revolution where developers can build websites and web apps using available standards and tools, and users adopt the web apps to solve their problems.
Revolution 1 has already occurred.
Revolution 2 is starting to take place.
[2]
Robots will adopt the nature of open standards which already exist for the web.
Instead of building robots in confined ecosystems, robots will be developed in shared standards which promote innovation and growth, while at the same time destroying today’s problem of high cost development. Developers will build on each other’s work and ideas, so they won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they create a robot or robot application.
As Revolution 2 progresses, drones will be one of the first forms of robots to take hold as a useful tool in our work and personal lives.
The progression of Revolution 1 and Revolution 2 brings us to the term
‘smart drone.’
Currently, drones in commercial use are quite limited and expensive to develop, whereas consumer and hobbyist drones are difficult to program and computationally underpowered to deliver real world tasks. The problem of price, power, and complexity will be eliminated by the smart drone.
How?
The term ‘smart drone’ comes from ‘smartphone.’ A device which is ‘smart’ is a device which is easily programmable to carry out a multitude of applications. The device is capable of transforming itself to best solve a specific problem.
“[A ‘smart’ device] is easily programmable to carry out a multitude of applications.”
[3]
In the same way that a smartphone can transform itself to perform tasks such as navigation, playing media, note taking, and social networking, a smart drone, in terms of its software, could transform itself into a tool for a multitude of uses such as industrial inspection, automated photography, data gathering, and environmental conservation.
“a smart drone, in terms of its software, could transform itself ”
What?
A smart drone will consist of a powerful computer on a drone. This will give the drone the same programmability and plasticity of a personal computer, tablet, and smartphone.
Although there doesn’t appear to be an ideal smart drone on the market, there are some tools and platforms which developers can purchase or download to turn an off-the-shelf or custom-built drone into a ‘smart drone’.
[4]
I’ve listed them here:
RAVN - Programming Drones Made Simple
3DR Services - DroneKit SDK UI
DroneDeploy - Drone Cloud Control
Dev DJI - (not open technology)
TL;DR
Software bots already automate a lot
Hardware robots will become cheaper
Drones will one of the first robots to become ubiquitous
Smart drones will be the next revolution in drones/robots
You can start developing on smart drone platforms already, some are quite simple to use
- Rakshak T
[1] https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/174710/robot_icon#size=128 ;
[2] https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/392500/estate_home_house_real_icon#size=128
[3] https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/315418/app_document_file_icon#size=128
[4] https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/352180/transform_icon#size=128
Comments
You could also check
http://flyver.co
We are building SDK for drones. At the end it should be hardware independent. :)
Drone - Rover - Robot - UAS: Potato - Pot-ato!
I very much agree with that in many ways.
In the future, it is simply going to be using the right platform for the right tasks and they will all be robots with some or a lot of autonomy.
Probably with a lot of Internet connections (SkyNet is getting legs and wings).
@Gary, I see. However, avian drones are only one type of drone. Land and nautical drones are also a part of this.
@Victor, yes we saw the Ubuntu Snappy and are happy that Canonical is taking this step. Thank you for the share!
Hi RaptorBird,
Very nice presentation and I agree with a lot of what you are saying.
However, I do think that there are some other important issues as well.
GPS and the fact that the "drone" can generally be high enough to be clear of ground based objects has made them easy to navigate from point to point and given them a head start.
Using a drone (quadcopter) as a sensing and observation platform is already feasible and becoming more practical and capable every day and to the extent that that is a valuable function quadcopters are well suited.
However, much of the emphasis on future robotics in all forms is going to be to actually "do things", interact with and manipulate the environment.
Robot vacuum cleaners being the current not very interesting state of the art.
And flying platforms are generally less well suited to these tasks than ground based robots.
Also flying "drones" also have a real problem with public / government perception and rule making which may significantly retard their evolution and implementation in practical uses.
Now that we are finally getting to the point where relative navigation with surrounding object interaction (laser scanners and 3D point cloud) is starting to become practical and economically feasible, ground based autonomous robots also become a great deal more "useful".
As it is, I believe you will see very strong growth of both multicopters (and for specific uses fixed wing) as sensor based observation and detection platforms) and considerable new growth in ground based robotics for practical task/work performance.
Multicopters will eventually be used for actual specific work based tasks such as crop spraying, tree trimming and line stringing, but that is a way off yet and some of those uses may be tethered and powered and controlled from the ground.
Best Regards,
Gary
@RaptorBird Robotics thanks for sharing your thoughts. I believe you might be interested in this blog post.
Cheers,