Huge growth for drones?

Chris Anderson has been involved with drones for a long while, first as an excited amateur and then as a businessman looking for the “right” application. In a far reaching article in Harvard Business Review see

Link to HBR article

he predicts huge growth, not where one might think in military, but in commercial applications such as mining, construction and architecture.

His second slide examines where drones are in the cycle of change

This is a fascinating article from a man who knows his stuff and well worth a read of the original at Harvard Business Review.

His company web site is at

3DR company web site

and with $53 million in new funding set to be a driving force in this transition.

OUR VIEW

Here at Future Technology Institute we totally agree with his analysis. In fact we don’t think it goes far enough or wide enough. A veritable explosion of real world application is on the cusp in agriculture, construction, geology, forestry, security and safety. So far these applications have been held back by the capability of the publicly available drones, cameras and software. Also legislation has hampered use. While a drone must be hand operated and not fly beyond sight the field is limited. But as drone software encompasses automatic multi-pass operations the opportunities expand hugely.

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