What are the perspectives on UAS in the next 5 years?
UAVs will be integrated in our cities. They will be used more and more, for a growing range of application, such as aerial photography, aerial surveying, aerial inspections, aerial surveillance – and probably also for the delivery of special goods, such as urgent medication. There will be special flight corridors in which these drones will fly back and forth. Maybe even consumer goods will be transported by drones, not to the door, but from warehouses to distribution centers. Delivery drones are more a question of legislation than technical capability.
What are the biggest challenges to face in the next 5 years?
Drone technology is developing extremely fast. Drones are ever more capable and sophisticated. The challenge will be to safely enable drones, in order to integrate this disruptive technology into our airspace and last not least our society. For this, we will need both, a matching legislation and a safe aerial infrastructure for drones – a task for companies such as Dedrone.
Which UAV applications are from the technological point of view mature enough to substitute traditional non-UAV methods?
There are many fields of application, in which drones are already faster, cheaper, and safer than traditional methods. Inspections of power lines, bridges or buildings, for example, have been executed with drones very efficiently for a couple of years. The same is true for surveying. Especially difficult to access areas such as quarries can be easily surveyed from the air. The data that is generated from the air is much more comprehensive and detailed than the data measured with a traditional tachymeter. Another field in which drones have become a standard tool is the film and image industry. Drones enable high-resolution pictures from spectacular perspectives that could otherwise only be taken with an immense effort and at much higher costs. Agriculture is a younger area of application, where drones are for example used to analyze pest infestation, to discover fawns before getting killed by harvesters, and there are even special drones that carry tanks for crop spraying. Drones are also used for scientific purposes, to monitor whales or birds, for example. As you can see, the range of application for drones is very big already – and as payload, speed, flight time and intelligence are increasing, more applications will be added.
