Most people know what a drone is; simply put, it’s something that flies. Hobbyist drones are super cool, super fun, and super exciting, and while they’re amazing for people of all ages to have fun zipping around, sometimes taking pictures while doing flips and stunts; they aren’t the most practical. In this blog post, I’ll be discussing the use cases, and the drawbacks, to hobbyist drones’ more industrial, practical, and ultimately dangerous counterparts, commercial drones.
To start, commercial drones are simply drones that are sold to an organization or company for some purpose. Commercial drones fall under many categories, often accomplishing many. Examples of these categories include photography, real estate, agriculture, package delivery, rail inspection, electrical line inspection, search and rescue, geographical mapping, and even water conservation. Drones used for these purposes are often much larger, more powerful, and more advanced than your run of the mill hobbyist drones.
The commercial drone industry is set to grow at a record breaking rate of 57% annual growth per year; faster than many other emerging industries. Most of the growth is projected to occur in package delivery, a necessary upgrade from air shipping and drivers in an effort to reduce pollution, last mile costs, and delivery times. While the technology for electronic package delivery by drones already exists (Amazon, Alphabet, and even Walmart have entire drone sectors focused on developing package delivery technology), the limiting factor is not technological, but logistical. Here is where most people get confused about drone delivery: Drone delivery already exists in some extremely rural trial areas because we have the technology to do so, but is not widespread, and will not be widespread for at least 5 or 10 years because of logistical concerns.
For one, it is very very difficult, if not impossible, to attain a zero failure rate in drones. What this means is that despite 99% of missions completing successfully, the 1% is potentially dangerous. What I mean by this is that if a battery, flight controller, or gps tracker fails during flight, it could cause the drone to drop out of the sky. Well, what if drones are light and soft? This helps if they would be hitting people, although the altitude from which they fall is large enough to still cause significant personal injury. However, a much more drastic situation might be if a drone falls over a busy interstate highway onto the windshield of a moving car. In total, the windshield would most likely experience the force of a 10 kg object hitting it at 100+ miles per hour. This could cause huge pileups involving multiple vehicles and potential deaths to several people. When trucks fail, A package gets delivered a day late, whereas if a drone fails, it could cause deaths. This is the exact reason why drones are so heavily regulated by agencies like the FAA.
The Federal Aviation Administration is in the process of drafting and revising rules for commercial drone use in order to enable drone delivery to occur legally in more populated areas, while still maintaining a reasonable margin of safety.
Therefore, although the drone industry is projected to grow at a groundbreaking rate, the logistical and legal concerns, many of which are still up in the air (literally) will be the true determinant of whether the commercial drone industry will break the boundaries of human societies to fundamentally change the way we live our daily lives.