DailyPost 1798
DRONES – PRECISION, DATA & PREDICTABILTY
The liberal drone rules / regime, the vision of Global Drone Hub 2030 and the Digital Sky Platform facilitating the transformation to happen, is the magic sauce laid out for the country. It has the potential. Can we realize it? If yes, in which manner. The role drone plays have to be understood in detail to enthuse entrepreneurs, enthusiasts and users to jump on to this bandwagon. Otherwise, we will lose this great opportunity to drone photography and home delivery type of operations, which limits the ‘dil mange more’ feel. Drones have to be understood from the business application side; novel, innovative, creative and above all, have to be integrated into our business and life so that it becomes a dire necessity.
It has the capability and that too at a very small price. Do we have the capability to make it happen? The heights at which it operates, and the precision of visualization it provides, can help sector after sector; agriculture, forestry, climactic issues et al. The business case has to be in place. The satellite imagery and the ground-based photography cannot come anywhere nearby. It also can provide the live real time dynamic video, to be used for whatever might be the business applications. When a new technology comes, more so a general-purpose technology, applications pop up like as mushrooms in the monsoon.
The video live or recorded has lots of data and metadata which can be used for analysis. Nobody knew in the beginning when IT behemoths started as garage companies, that they fuel their money machines with data.* Now it’s known, what data can do for us. It is a tangible asset today. With millions of drones across our skies, the data capture would be humungous and its integration and usage for applications known & unknown today, can change the way we think, live, and conduct our business. The geospatial technology tools are already doing wonders on these footages, tomorrow will be more engaging commercially.
With half of the market of drones projected in Homeland Security by FICCI, its granularity has to be put in the public domain. Suffice to say what is envisaged by that projection is the large-scale use of drones by law enforcement agencies. How easy it would be to surveil a known offender or any subject of interest. Project management and monitoring construction and other activities under the open sky can revolutionize. We need the tools and more so the adoption capabilities. Volume and weight measurements in mining and other areas of environmental degradation or for any other purpose can change the nature of that business activity, research or project. How can fault detection monitoring of chimneys or other such not reachable and hazardous structures be done with ease? With humongous data of captured dynamic and real time, and ML / AL tools at your command, predictability cannot remain a distant dream in lots of areas.
DRONES ARE POSITIONED TO HACK US INTO A BETTER FUTURE.
Sanjay Sahay