White Paper | Rough and Tough – Drones for Australia’s Industry

UAV applications under extreme conditions remain to be a challenge for many companies around the world. Choosing the right platform versus a professional service provider for drone operation is equally challenging – especially when the results must be highly accurate.

As drone technology evolved significantly in 2013, it became a game-changing solution for several industries. In the meantime, national aviation authorities have prepared stable regulatory frameworks for realizing UAV operation and today almost every industry is deploying UAVs to increase productivity and safety.

Especially in the mining, construction and infrastructure industry, the technical solutions are mature enough to enable almost fully automated UAV operation, to provide data in the same or better quality in significantly less time compared to traditional methods from the ground or by plane or satellite.

This white paper explains how this strong tool offers a real alternative and includes following insights:

• The economic benefits and added-value of UAV deployment
• Regulatory framework
• Understanding the requirements for a successful UAV workflow
• Comparison of service provider capabilities

In the last 20 years, China and India almost tripled their share of the global economy. Global competition and price dumping lead to challenges in cost and quality for the world’s 13th largest economy – Australia (Department of infrastructure and regional development 2014). Establishing UAV applications provides high potential for:

• optimizing costs, quality, time and safety across several industries. The UAV market alone is expected to grow to $127 billion in 2020 (PWC 2016).
• UAVs truly are a game-changing technology making an impact specifically in low-margin industries. Collecting data via UAV improves data quality, increases work security and makes results accessible much faster. There are many application-specific solutions available today covering tasks like inspection, mapping, surveying and many more.
• Many different sensors (optoelectronic, electrochemical, temperature or radio sensors, etc.) have been modified to work with UAVs to acquire data close to the ground and at low speed – this increases result quality and operational safety while reducing costs and downtimes.
• Unmanned aerial systems are very complex – improper handling (flight planning, hardware set-up, analytics, etc.) can lead to a dramatic loss of quality. Professional service providers can ensure the required quality, especially when it comes to very complex UAV appliactions.