Romeo Durscher is Senior Vice President of Strategy, Auterion.
getty
Right now, the pace of transformation in the drone and mobile robotics industry is nothing short of thrilling. As different, broad technological trends mature—including cloud and edge computing, distributed data analytics, 5G+ networks, advanced AI/ML, open source and standards development and numerous software and hardware efficiencies—drones are steadily integrating the innovations. That has already improved the capacities drones have, the functions they can serve and their impact on users, businesses and governments. And much more is to come.
The future of drones and all autonomous mobile robotics, whether deployed in airspace, outer space, undersea or on land, will loosely follow the evolution of another now-ubiquitous piece of technology: the personal computer. Like PCs, the development of drones is leading us into a highly connected future. Let’s compare trajectories.
Where We’ve Been: A Standalone Experience
By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, early personal computers, built by the likes of IBM, Xerox, Apple, Commodore, Hewlett-Packard and others, hit a nascent consumer market, billed as devices for personal finance, word processing and hobby programming. They were standalone units with proprietary features that people bought because they were fun to use, had a “cool” factor and felt experimental. They were also very manual and slow. Data transfer happened on large floppy discs that gradually reduced in size and format. And buyers believed in their future integration.
About a decade ago, the first small uncrewed aerial vehicles directed at consumers hit the market. While drones were certainly not new to military and research organizations, these retail lightweight and remotely-piloted devices were cool, like the early PCs, and fun for buzzing a field and capturing images and video, which were saved on SD cards for a very manual transfer of collected data. The drones were personal, standalone devices and unconnected to anything but their own remote control unit. Many, of course, still are, and the SD card data transfer remains time-consuming and not at all scalable.
When the internet became publicly available via the world wide web in 1993, PCs started to talk to each other, and once they got connected, the true power of networks and applications came to life for business and social engagement. With drones and mobile robotics, we’re now at that inflection point. The connectivity needed for data transfer to happen is emerging. We need the platforms of mobile autonomous systems to talk to each other so that they can undergo the same transformations that personal computing, including digital phones and gaming, has undergone. The stakes are high for drones because as they have become more compact, powerful and affordable, their potential for everyday business use has skyrocketed.
Open Standardization Is The Now And Near Future
The manufacturing of consumer drones has largely been dominated by a single Chinese vendor with proprietary software. Even as new manufacturers in Europe and the Americas have become key market players, the need for open standardization of operating systems, components and protocols is more poignant than ever.
PCs, too, went through a painful phase where nothing was standardized. If you bought a printer, you had to find the proper driver that you then downloaded. Every kind of component was in a parallel interface. Then, along came the universal serial bus (USB) to save the day, as well as protocols that all manufacturers of printers, keyboards and mice adhere to. Now, personal computing is plug-and-play with hardware, software and public cloud services.
As open standardization takes shape in the drone industry, a camera or sensor manufacturer, for example, will have a standard that they can build towards, one that works with multiple platforms from multiple manufacturers. Users will be able to take the component off one system and employ it in another. The mobile robotics industry is inventing its “USB,” so to speak, and its equivalent of software interoperability and internet transfer protocols. The military has kickstarted interoperability with the RAS-A MAVLink Interoperability Profile (IOP).
The goal is not to reinvent everything but to build on top of APIs. App and software developers are using open standards to create solutions so all of the components “just work” within a well-tuned, expanding ecosystem.
Future-Forward Behavior Comes From Actionable Data
With standardized operating systems and software that onboard supercomputing capabilities and app deployments to the drone itself, AI on the edge can be leveraged for fast data consumption and analysis—transforming drones into decision makers. They’ll be able to autonomously adjust their course and share information across a full drone fleet. Access to real-time, actionable data is key. AI models and improved algorithms can filter and deliver the data that’s necessary for a task, weeding out superfluous data that isn’t actionable. Imagine this in a search and rescue or fire-fighting aid scenario or even for large-scale infrastructure assessment and retail goods delivery.
Interoperable, open standards software and real-time, actionable data utilization are the backbone for autonomous fleet deployment and integrated workflows.
Where We’re Heading: An Ecosystem Across Dedicated Airspace
A true drone ecosystem will create an efficient flywheel where drone manufacturers, camera and sensor builders and payload, component and app developers together empower connected, scalable fleets. And, in the not-too-distant future, uncrewed fleet vehicles may well be operating fairly autonomously in a dedicated low layer of airspace. The drone industry to date has moved the pilot from the airplane to the ground, operating one drone at a time. In order for this to be scalable and cost-effective, as the drone pilot is the most expensive part of the deployment, a change is needed: One human operator will control many platforms and won’t be a pilot anymore but more of an air traffic controller.
Further down the road—as drones fully come into their own as the PC and its permutations have—we may find ourselves pointing on a digital map and telling a mobile robotics device where exactly we want it to go and what exactly we want it to do. It will just execute, autonomously understanding its environment through 5G- or 6G-connected, AI-driven data analysis.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
