Commercial drones are revolutionizing business operations. However, most people still associate drones with expensive military aircraft or consumer toys!
The recent data has shown that there will be more practical commercial applications in near future. Due to driving efficiency and data analytics, many industries have adopted this technology for different reasons.
Here is a list of industries who uses drone for aerial mapping and surveying.
Civil Engineering
Almost any step of the engineering process will benefit from aerial craft, from preparation to final production. For items like aerial mapping and making advertising videos for tourism attractions, airplanes and helicopters are still commonly used in civil engineering.
However, as UAV costs and entry barriers decline, virtually all civil engineering programs will benefit from their use. Drones, for example, may help minimize the time and cost historically involved in inspecting utilities, building highways and forest roads and tracking the deterioration of shorelines.
Agriculture
Drones are a perfect match for the farming environment, where farmers can take advantage of real-time intelligence on large tracts of land. Drones will help control almost all, including the use of water, crop quality, heat signatures, and analysis of soil.
Expensive aerial surveying observation can now be performed regularly or even daily with drones that cost just hundreds of dollars. Agriculture continues to be one of the most interesting industrial uses for robotics and drones.
Insurance
Insurance agencies, especially after major hurricanes, are still handling claims. By helping adjusters to gather visual data from the clouds instead of scrambling up ladders, drones help insurance agencies process reports on roof loss even quicker.
Insurance agencies also use drones for the reconstruction of collisions, allowing them to put together how an auto crash happened so that the authenticity of auto-related insurance statements can be checked.
Energy
Having access to real-time knowledge on the state of power generation and transmission infrastructure is part of making our electricity grid smart. Unmanned aerial vehicles have also been tested by utilities to inspect transmission and distribution lines, to look for damage from floods and usual wear and tear.
In a single flight, drones can even examine hundreds of miles of transmission lines, far quicker than the typical line worker who needs to ascend multiple transmission poles.
Warehousing
Drones can be used to scan thousands of items in a warehouse. It is only logical that major retailers are implementing drone technologies for their inventory needs.
Wal-Mart has been exploring the use of drones to search and flag lost products in its warehouses. Drones flying around the warehouse will do a complete inventory search in a day, according to the firm, a process that usually takes a month to do manually for individuals.
Conclusion
So, indeed, drones can be useful and are still being used in commercial applications. For many businesses that use the Commercial Internet of Things, drones are now a strategic edge (IoT). How do you think drones can help in your business? Or are you already using it?
