What Is the Development Trend of Industrial Drones?

There are many categories of drones, which are divided according to application fields and can be divided into civilian drones and mini drones, industrial drones, military drones, etc. To enhance everyone’s understanding of drones, this article will introduce the development trends of industrial drones and the application fields of industrial drones. 

Development Trend of Industrial Drones

First of all, increased industry awareness promotes the deepening of industry applications. Awareness of industrial drones in all walks of life is still low since the heat wave of consumer-grade industrial drones has overshadowed industrial-grade industrial drones. As time goes by, consumer-grade industrial drones have gradually come out of people’s sight, while industrial-grade industrial drones have become a new hot topic. With the improvement of industry awareness, it will become possible for industrial drones to enter a wider range of industry fields, which will also promote the continuous deepening of industry applications and the industry’s scale will gradually grow.

Secondly, the improvement of industrial drone technology solves the pain points of the industry. The technical bottlenecks of industrial drones are mainly reflected in the endurance time, load weight, reliability, and operating radius. In particular, the endurance time and load weight face more difficult technical difficulties. The performance of existing industrial drones still needs to be improved.

However, as industry companies continue to increase their investment in technology research and development, the solution to the industry’s technical bottlenecks will be very likely to happen in the next few years. Therefore, once the pain points of the industry are relieved, the application of industrial drones will be like a wild horse running wild, in-depth, and extensive, and the market size will also undergo earth-shaking changes. By then, products with long battery life and high load will become the mainstream, meeting customers’ needs for battery life and high load to the greatest extent. At the same time, with the expansion and deepening of the application fields of industrial drones in the future, the industry will put forward higher requirements for the operating radius and remote control distance of industrial drones, which will push industry products to longer-distance remote control and higher-definition transmission. The direction of the development of the diagram.

Application Fields of Industrial Drones

There are seven major fields of industrial drones. As the technology develops, drones have become increasingly popular in more and more industries. Now let’s explore the 6 industrial-grade application areas for drones.

1. Agricultural Plant Protection

Plant protection drones have huge market prospects and are also the first areas to make profits in the civilian drone market. According to statistics, in 2016, the area of plant protection drone operations in China exceeded 28 million acres, and the number of plant protection drones exceeded 6,000.

2. Communication Relay

Building a high-altitude wireless Internet. There are currently nearly 60% of people in the world still don’t have access to the Internet.

As the world and society develop rapidly, people are nowadays much more connected than ever before. Even People in the remote and undeveloped areas started to use the Internet. Under this premise, drones will have great prospects in the field of communications.

3. Safety Inspection

With the rapid development of the mobile communications industry, communication base stations have become more and more widely covered across the world, and high-density station construction and inspection work is increasing gradually. In particular, most of these new jobs are located in remote areas with relatively poor operating conditions, such as natural mountainous villages with harsh environments or sparsely populated areas, as well as border areas and Gobi deserts. Choosing a suitable drone platform, greatly alleviates the problems of high labor costs, high operating intensity, high operating risks, incomplete and accurate detection data, etc., to optimize and improve operating efficiency and benefits.

4. Base Station Function Expansion

That is, through a 5G prototype network based on local switching of base stations and network switching between multiple sites, real-time control testing of drones was carried out, and the function of sharing network sites between drones and ordinary commercial mobile phone users was realized.

5. Information Services

As a data acquisition platform with higher efficiency and better adaptability to various environments, drones are an important aerial data port for future smart cities. They can make full use of communication and information technology means such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, optical networks, and mobile Internet. By sensing, transmitting, integrating, and analyzing key information of the city’s core operating systems, it intelligently responds to various needs such as public services, social management, and other activities.

6. Logistics and Transportation

Due to China’s vast territory and transportation and other factors, logistics and transportation still cannot meet everyone’s needs. Drones are less affected by factors such as terrain and transportation and are convenient and intelligent, so they will also have great potential in logistics and transportation in the future.

In China, the large drone-supporting supply chain is gradually maturing. After airworthiness and mass production are mature, it will develop rapidly in the direction of improving productization and reducing use costs. Compared with traditional logistics transportation methods, when drone logistics is rolled out on a large scale in the future, delivery time will be shortened by about 60%, and overall delivery costs will be reduced by 40%-50%. It can reduce costs and increase efficiency, filling gaps in the logistics industry.

Summary

This article has introduced the development trends of industrial drones. Consumer-grade drones currently overshadow industrial drones, however, as awareness grows, consumer-grade industrial drones will definitely come out of people’s sight and become a new hot topic. The way to develop industrial drones faces some challenges including endurance time, load weight, reliability, and operating radius. As the technology develops, these pain points will be overcome in the end and the applications of industrial drones will be promoted more greatly, which mostly include agricultural plant protection, communication relay, safety inspection, base station function expansion, information services, and logistics and transportation.

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