Here Comes the War for Commercial Drone Dominance
Here Comes the War for Commercial Drone Dominance
Unmanned vehicles can provide unprecedented information
for a business. But first, you need to manage the flood of data.
by Justin Bachman May 10, 2017, 7:00 AM PDT
At some point in the not-too-distant future, fleets of
commercial drones are expected to swarm across American skies. Companies in a
wide range of industries will employ unmanned vehicles for tactical advantage—inspecting
infrastructure, surveying crops, maybe even estimating how much your new roof
will cost.
And when these drones fly, a torrent of data will follow
them like an invisible contrail.
“Data is the new oil,” Intel Corp. Chief Executive
Officer Brian Krzanich said this week at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle
Systems International’s annual Xponential conference in Dallas, the industry’s
top trade show. He cited a growing competitive “separation” between companies
that collect and understand their data and those that don’t. A single
autonomous car can generate the same data trove as 3,000 people surfing the
internet, while a small drone fleet could easily create 150 terabytes of data
per day, he said (1,000 gigabytes equals 1 terabyte). “The data rate is going
to explode on us in the next few years,” Krzanich said.
But how to handle that wide open fire hose of
information?
“Operation of an unmanned system is no longer a
stand-alone activity,” Lockheed Martin Corp. proclaims in its promotional materials
for its Hydra Fusion Tools software. “There [is] an assortment of maps, images,
video, and intelligence which are being broadcast to the operators and this
needs to be fused into a common operational picture.” This proposition,
unsurprisingly, is leading to an array of new business models aimed at helping
companies sift through and exploit the mountains of information headed their
way.
Into this universe comes Airbus SE, the European
aerospace conglomerate. Airbus is starting a new data company, called Airbus
Aerial, to provide an array of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) services, a field
the company estimates could increase to more than $120 billion annually as the
use of these fleets expands, said Dirk Hoke, CEO of Airbus’s defence and space
group. Hoke introduced the new company Wednesday at Xponential.
The proliferation of commercial drones won’t be so much
about getting your pizza or new shirt faster—although there is that
consideration—but a broader change in how companies employ aerial surveillance and
data to inform their businesses, spurred by efficiency and new U.S. rules
allowing commercial unmanned systems to operate at farther distances,
autonomously.
A diverse array of companies, ranging from insurers and
utilities to real estate and energy, are likely to shift some of their
operations to UAV. Some of the work now done by helicopters could be replaced
at lower cost. Insurers, for example, are finding aerial surveillance to be a
good method for assessing claims after tornadoes and hurricanes and to help
understand risks in their underwriting activities.
Airbus Aerial aims to compile high-altitude data from a
fleet of eight Airbus satellites and drones, blending it into an intelligence
service for agriculture, insurance, oil and gas, utilities, and state and local
governments. Aerial will be based in Germany, near Munich, with U.S. offices in
Atlanta.
The company sees 2017 as a way to explore the market,
testing the business with “a small, select group of customers” to determine how
clients will value Aerial’s services, said Jana Rosenmann, Airbus senior vice
president of unmanned aerial systems. Airbus will fly third-party drones for
its clients but will also explore building its own hardware, she said. “The
initial business is not relying on Airbus having its own drone today,”
Rosenmann said in a telephone interview.
The company already operates high-altitude solar-powered
UAVs, dubbed Zephyr, which has stayed aloft for as long as 14 days. Airbus calls
Zephyr “a high-altitude pseudo satellite” due to its high cruising level of up
to 70,000 feet.
Most customers will have a specific need for the services
of companies like Aerial and won’t care how the information is acquired, be it
by drone, satellite, or other means, said Jesse Kallman, who will lead the
Airbus unit’s U.S. operations. “A drone is really just a truck that you stick a
sensor on,” he said. “We will use whatever hardware makes the most sense.”
Aerial pricing is likely to be tailored to a specific market or customer,
Kallman said, ranging from recurring subscriptions to one-off jobs.
To date, one of the major impediments to commercial drone
flying has been the lack of federal rules, which are now pending at the Federal
Aviation Administration. The regulations sort out operational guidelines to
integrate UAVs safely into existing air traffic. Although slow to get these
rules squared away, the American UAV service market may mature more quickly
than in Europe, owing to the U.S. having only a single regulatory body, Hoke
said.
Yet as soon as these new commercial operations take
flight, those who employ them will be grappling with “the whole info-glut
problem,” said Nazlin Kanji, a program director at AeroVironment Inc., a Simi
Valley, Calif.-based defense contractor that builds drones and analytics
software for military and civilian use. “It’s an interesting challenge because
the amount of data that drones generate is huge—we’re talking petabytes and
petabytes of data,” she said (1,000 terabytes equals 1 petabyte). “It really
becomes that big data problem everybody keeps talking about but no one really
knows how to address.”
The field of drone services has already begun seeing
consolidation among smaller players, with much of the business focused on
courting large companies and recurring revenue streams, said Jon Damush, vice
president of commercial at Insitu, a Boeing Co. subsidiary that builds and
flies drones. Over time, given the cost of contracting with a drone service,
some of the larger drone data users—such as miners and pipeline operators—might
decide to buy their own drones and software. “When you become a certain size on
the expense line, somebody’s going to notice,” Damush said.
But Kanji counters that there’s room “for a lot of
different vendors,” from companies that offer just data storage to others that
may sell analysis, data collection, or a combination. Some of these data
wranglers focus on software, offering drone users the ability to create
detailed interfaces for the data that UAVs emit.
Others, such as Insitu, focus on drone reconnaissance and
data analysis for railroads, large mining companies in Australia, and pipeline
operators. That’s the larger-scale end of the business, leaving many smaller
players eager to exploit common drone necessities among many industries. “One
thing we’ve found is that with agriculture, utilities, railroads, and
construction, a lot of them have very similar needs,” Kanji said, citing one
example: “All of them worry about vegetation.”
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