Beyond Movies and Toys: 9 Businesses Drones Are Changing

The skies of the future will be "full of cameras and sensors"

"A drone is a smartphone that flies." So said Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired and author of Makers, in a talk at Maker Faire last weekend.

Anderson's view of where drones are heading is simple: they will run on the same chips as smartphones and improve at the same pace. Drones already use many of the same processors and new Wi-Fi parts as phones. Even the US$50 million that Anderson's drone company, 3D Robotics, recently raised came from Qualcomm, the giant that supplies communications chips to Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi and other phone makers.

Ten years ago, a drone was either a war machine costing tens of millions or a "model aircraft" fit only to be a toy. Today, with smartphones everywhere and processors and sensors far cheaper, a capable drone costs only four or five figures in yuan. And the price will keep falling.

As drones have grown cheaper and better, their uses have multiplied: filming, farming, sports training, security... Drones have already touched more than one industry.

Variety shows and films made drones famous

"It keeps following us," said Kimi, the son of Taiwanese star Jimmy Lin, pointing at the camera drone overhead in Where Are We Going, Dad?

China's hottest variety show of 2013 was filmed in remote, empty landscapes, and aerial shots from drones made them all the more striking. The crew fitted a professional DSLR to a Zenmuse Z15-5D gimbal on a DJI Spreading Wings drone to get its high-altitude views. Once the show aired, the DJI drones became almost as famous as the show itself.

Drones for filming are exactly what made the Chinese drone maker DJI grow so fast. Founded in 2006, DJI saw its business grow 80-fold within three years. By the end of 2014, its revenue had reached 3 billion yuan; it was expected to double in 2015, and the company was valued at US$10 billion. According to Reuters, of the 129 US companies approved to fly drones, 61, or 47%, use DJI products.

Last year Eric Cheng, DJI's director of aerial imaging, flew a drone over a volcano in Iceland to shoot a documentary, showing viewers active lava up close, a sight hard to reach and never before seen from so near. The footage was soon rebroadcast on ABC's Good Morning America and picked up by Wired and other outlets.

Filmmakers have embraced drones mainly because drones widen what a camera can see. They are small, so they can reach dangerous, cramped or high places people cannot, and they make aerial filming far cheaper. Before drones, an aerial shot meant renting an expensive helicopter. "People are actually going to fly drones to the ends of the earth and shoot beautiful pictures, and it doesn't cost a lot of money. I mean, who ever thought that could happen?" Randy Scott Slavin, founder of the New York City Drone Film Festival, told Wired in an earlier interview. The festival held its first edition only recently, and Slavin hopes it will show more people what drone photography can do.

In fact, several Hollywood films have already used drones. The opening of Skyfall, with Bond racing a motorcycle across Turkish rooftops, the villa party in The Wolf of Wall Street, and many shots in The Hobbit were all filmed by drone. James Cameron, director of Avatar, is also a fan of drone filming.

Drone delivery: the first business idea, and an awkward start

Of all the business ideas for drones, the first to catch the public eye was delivery.

As early as the end of 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed in a television interview that the company was working on a drone delivery plan, "Amazon Prime Air." It is limited to small packages under 2.26 kilograms, but delivery from warehouse to doorstep in 30 minutes appeals both to shoppers and to Amazon, which wants faster shipping.

Less than a year after Amazon's announcement, DHL made the world's first drone delivery, flying urgent medicine to Juist, a small German island of only 2,000 people. Many other attempts followed. In August 2014, Google revealed Project Wing, a drone program for delivering urgent medicine that it had been testing for two years, saying it could get heart medication to a patient within 3 minutes.

Earlier this year, QDaily also took part in China's first drone delivery, though it was more publicity stunt than service. On February 3, Taobao, YTO Express and the Ningbo company Shouquanzhai ran a joint promotion using drone delivery. Because YTO still needed the customer to sign for the package in person, picture a courier on a bike pedaling along behind the drone. On March 23 this year, SF Express also began testing drone delivery in remote hills and villages of the Pearl River Delta; 500 of its drones now drop off packages every day in remote parts of Shenzhen and Huizhou.

Delivery is the most talked-about use for drones, but in practice it faces many limits. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted Amazon's plan right after it was announced, and only this year granted permission for outdoor test flights. Google had to go to Australia to test its drones. In China, cities such as Beijing ban flights inside the Fifth Ring Road, and a drone that detects an address inside it will not even take off.

And even if it could fly, drone delivery is in an awkward spot. Packages flying at low altitude may be stolen or fall, and a courier still has to follow behind to get the recipient's signature. In an ordinary city, that saves no labor at all. What about remote mountain areas? There, the first problem may be that most drones cannot fly for more than 30 minutes on one battery.

Live sports from many positions and angles

Besides filming, live broadcasting is another popular use for drones.

At the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, snowboarding and downhill events were broadcast live with drones. These events are fast and exciting to watch, and drone shots add to the spectacle.

In March this year, the US network Fox Sports used drones to broadcast a motocross race live. Eric Shanks, the network's COO, was enthusiastic: "We certainly won't use drones only for motorcycle races, but a new and unique perspective, with several drones shooting a fast, intense race at once, is a great start. We're excited about what we learned from this broadcast, and I'll try more."

Drones can also do what fixed overhead rigs and helicopters cannot. They can shoot from the air above a stadium. Sideline rigs give a low-angle view but can only go so high; cameras can be strung on cables between sections of a stadium roof, but so what? Drones can go there too, and almost anywhere else in the stadium.

Perhaps the only open question is safety. But with an experienced pilot at the controls, the risk can be kept within acceptable limits.

A new view for team training

Drones are not only broadcasting games; they have even found their way into team training.

Jackson Academy, a US high school known for producing athletes, has used DJI drones to film football practice since 2014. During practice, drones carrying action cameras film from every angle in the air, capturing what each player does and giving coaches a complete view. Head coach David Sykes calls the drone "a great teaching tool." The football teams at the University of Tennessee and Oregon State University also record practice by drone so they can study formations and players' physical condition.

Using drones to improve training is becoming a trend. From a drone's panoramic view overhead, athletes can see how the best players position themselves within the team and how they time their runs. Nothing else can do this: a helicopter is too expensive and too big for an ordinary school, and an ordinary camera tripod can hardly get a view from on high.

Drones have collected training data not only on teams' own players but also on rivals. Last December, the English football club Manchester United found someone using a drone to "spy" on its tactical drills. In the end, manager Louis van Gaal had to post extra security guards to patrol the area.

A new farmhand

Fly a drone back and forth over a field and you will draw a crowd. In China, farming has long been the least mechanized, least automated industry, and even farmers feel that a high-tech gadget like a drone does not belong in their fields. Yet farming is seen as a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars for drones.

In sparsely populated places abroad that are short of labor, some farmers already use drones to herd livestock in place of people. A drone sees better than a person, and it doesn't mind climbing hills, wading streams or getting up early. Its eyesight brings another advantage: with a special infrared camera, a drone can gauge how badly the crops below are hit by pests and disease as it passes over. Because areas dense with insects give off a distinctive wave frequency, a single aerial photo shows where an infestation is.

In China, farm drones have one more advantage: they are nimble enough to spray the Zhangs' plot without touching the Lis' seedlings next door, on China's patchwork of small fields. And while cities are full of no-fly zones, over farmland drones are relatively "free."

"However simple the controls are, farmers may not know how to use them, and they really don't need to," said Peng Bin, CEO of the drone company XAG, in an interview with QDaily at an agricultural fair in April this year.

XAG is one of China's earliest drone companies. In 2012 it moved from aerial photography to agriculture and built a complete system for farm drones.

In fact, a human pilot makes a drone inefficient and erratic. Most farm drones fly routes calculated in advance, and even technicians only set up the system. A crop-spraying system includes a ground weather station, a surveying pole for mapping the site, a control console built from a tablet computer, and a drone fitted with spray nozzles, along with several batteries.

Farm drones are mostly a business-to-business trade. For XAG, selling annual packages of 10 spraying services a year directly to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is a business model that has already proved itself.

Drone operating systems are a business too

Beyond building drones themselves, there is money in "drone operating systems," which cut the cost of making and developing drones. Such a system works like a brain installed in the drone, handling basic flight control; developers build on it, saving the cost of writing basic controls themselves and adding new features.

The US startup Airware has built a drone operating system called the Aerial Information Platform (AIP). It includes Flight Core, an onboard brain the size of a matchbox; Ground Control Station, ground command software; and Airware Cloud, a cloud service. With this kit, you can send several drones along preset routes at once, control their flight precisely, and build more complex commands on top.

Chris Anderson's 3D Robotics has launched a similar autopilot system for drones, APM. Install US$249 of hardware alongside the software, and an aircraft can track location data and fly itself without a pilot. The company recently also released DroneKit, an interface that makes drone apps easier to write, so software developers can build mobile control programs for drones.

"We want to be the Android of drones," Anderson explained. He says 80% of the drones on Kickstarter now use 3D Robotics' open-source code.

Drone driving schools

The US Consumer Electronics Association estimates that 400,000 civilian drones will be sold worldwide, a market worth US$130 million. As sales grow, so will the number of drone "drivers." Each brand flies differently, and learning takes some effort. So some people have started schools to train drone pilots.

Australia already has such courses. Victorian UAS Training, for example, teaches not only theory but also flying skills and how to work accessories such as the onboard camera. Lessons work like driving lessons: one-on-one, and you must pass a test with an instructor to get your "driver's license," a permit to fly drones commercially.

More flexible security

Security may be a commercial use for drones you seldom think of.

Last year, at an ordinary football game at a high school in the Ysleta ISD in the US, a drone hovering over the campus kept watch on security. Compared with building a campus security system, the school felt the US$4,000 it spent on the drone was money well spent.

"This drone is great," said De La Torre, the school's assistant principal. "We use it for security monitoring. We can also use it to shoot aerial video and take environmental readings like temperature and wind speed. If a child visiting the school gets lost, the drone can help. If a student skips class and runs off, the drone can catch them too."

A drone with a high-definition camera is closed-circuit television that can fly.

A flying pet that takes pictures

Consumer drones are a fairly young idea, and pet drones are a market within it that has taken shape only in the past 2 years.

A drone makes an almost perfect robot pet. It can stay at your side anywhere; climbing, surfing and skiing are no problem. As it follows you, it can carry a GoPro action camera and shoot video or photos from above, from an angle nothing else can match.

About a week ago, the Lily drone took social media by storm. Once you see what it can do, the selfie stick looks feeble. Its features are still experimental, and there are reports that it was unreliable in real-world tests, but it still shows how much people imagine for this young market.

In its official video, Lily also showed off a waterproof design, or the ability to take off from water. Tossed into a stream, it bobs up out of the water and flies off again.

Lily was designed by two computer science students at the University of California, Berkeley. Like the Airdog (first image) and the Hexo+, both unveiled at the CES consumer electronics show earlier this year, it is still moving from the lab to the market.

But as drones spread, the clash between business and regulators grows sharper. In the US, Amazon's run-ins with the FAA keep making headlines. In China, drone use is at an even earlier stage. No formal drone rules have been issued yet, and in first-tier cities such as Beijing, drones are still banned inside the Fifth Ring Road.

The sky "full of cameras and sensors" that Chris Anderson looks forward to still has to win over businesses, consumers and regulators.

Cover image: Ibtimes