In the not too distant future, your daily commute will consist of riding along comfortably in a fully autonomous vehicle while you either make calls, catch up on emails, or maybe drop into your morning meditation. Along the way, you’ll see drones flying around autonomously creating value – they will launch from boxes on farms, perches on buildings and towers, or giant drone hives. In one flight, they might be used to collect data for multiple service providers selling insights to multiple customers, conduct inspections, provide real time aerial perspectives, and eventually return to the nearest charging station to prepare for the next mission. The data will stream straight from the sensor to the cloud for processing, analysis, and delivery to its end destinations, and there will be no pilot involved. But… we still have a long way to go before this autonomous future actually exists. In our opinion, the work done to enable autonomous drone data capture will provide valuable lessons learned for the significantly more difficult challenge of autonomous vehicles driving you to work.
In this video, we focus on a few specific processes and concepts that will help us get a little closer to automation in the field. We walk through existing technologies and concepts that will grow in popularity and help bridge the gap between fully manual and fully autonomous operation.
One of the applications that can be used to bring a scalable process for data capture into the field today is Autopilot for DJI drones. In this walkthru video, Oren shows how this iOS application can be used to enable scalable commercial drone operations with features like templated missions, shareable flights, and preset templates for flight plan generation to capture maps and models.
Thanks for watching!
-Colin