Wireless Connectivity, Drones will Team for a More Capable Future, Speakers Say
Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics and founder of DIY Drones, said at the Interdrone conference that cloud and cell phone connectivity will enable drones to get smarter faster, so they don’t have to remap the world just for themselves every time they move through it.
Borrowing from the automated vehicle industry, drones can instead tap into maps that are updated by millions of users to learn about their environment.
“When you start thinking about cloud architecture you think about fence and avoid. Sense and avoid says I know nothing, I am groping my way around,” he said.
With the concept of fence and avoid, “I walk in a room, and say, hey, has anyone been here before, get a map, and then use my eyes to focus on any change.”
It’s a shared world concept familiar to players of Pokemon Go, where different phones interact with a real world that has additional data displayed on top of it, he said.
The same thing is happening in the automotive world, through apps like Waze, where drivers report changing road conditions to a shared database. Cars equipped with cameras are starting to scan the roads and share that information as well.
“We’re sharing this with the autonomous car world,” Anderson said. “We’re in the same business, we’re solving the same problems, we’re going to solve them the same way.”
CTIA Supermobility
Connectivity is also the main point of CTIA’s annual conference, Supermobility, which covers all things related to the wireless industry.
AUVSI hosted a panel discussion there on the use of drones in the wireless industry and AUVSI President and CEO Brian Wynne took part in another panel focusing on use cases for drones.
In the first panel, industry representatives discussed their connectivity needs and how they use drones to make their work safer and more efficient.
Cell phone networks need cell phone towers, and cell phone towers are things that currently are mostly inspected by having climbers go up them. Art Pregler, director of national mobility systems for AT&T, said his company has 65,000 cell tower sites, with “people on our towers daily.”
That means about 15,000 workers climbing cell towers almost every day.
Sean Cushing, president and COO of Hazon Solutions, said his company also wants to reduce the number of tower climbers needed, although he said drones wouldn’t replace all of them.
“Climbers have their place. I believe the last climber has not been born yet,” Cushing said.
However, drones could be used to help reduce the number of climbs that aren’t necessary, he said.
“The metric may never really be known, but if we can see over time a reduction in the number of unnecessary climbs, hopefully we’ll see a reduction in injuries that comes from that,” he said.
Drones are getting easier to fly, as evidenced by Intel’s RealSense technology, which puts a sense and avoid package into a tiny tube. However, speakers on the panel said that operators will still need to be highly trained rather than just relying on that technology.
Cushing noted that his 16-year-old son is old enough under the new small UAS rule to fly a drone, but said he’s not mature enough to operate it without safety backups, such as geofencing that would keep it from flying too high or in places it shouldn’t go.
“The improvements in technology are why we can have these discussions,” he said. “It wasn’t too long ago that the safety and the controls really didn’t give us the confidence to perform these acts. Now that we have that we cannot forget the training aspect of it.”
During the second panel, representatives from AT&T and Qualcomm discussed their recent announcement that they have teamed to fly drones using AT&T’s LTE network. The companies have had more than 500 flights so far, said Qualcomm Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Matt Grob. They’re doing the testing to understand the capability and the effect of such use on the network.
Matt Walsh, director of business development for AT&T’s IoT Solutions, said the partners are studying the effects on the network of adding drones to the network, although it already handles millions of cell phones so should have enough capacity.
“That’s what we’re looking at now,” he said. “What does it look like when you’re not just flying one drone but when you multiply that by 100 and do it in a single area?”
