Nathan Mattise
Down the street from the world's premier home of 1940s tech (the National World War II Museum), NOLA got a taste of modern autonomy.
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NEW ORLEANS—If you need evidence that drones are big business, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) XPonential conference is a good start. The event, in its previous incarnation, filled a much more modest space in Washington DC three years ago, and was much more defense-focused. But this week's event, filling four of the vast halls of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center here on the bank of the Mississippi River, had the trappings of a big tech conference. Keynotes were supplied by Amazon vice president Gur Kimchi and Cisco's retired CEO John Chambers (complete with the requisite "hockey stick" growth slides), while vendors hawked cloud platforms and professional services alongside the expected collection of flying, swimming, rolling, and crawling robots.
The cloud connection to drones is gaining increasing attention because of the massive amount of data that uncrewed vehicles collect. Optical and multi-spectral imagery, 3D laser mapping, and any number of other geospatial datapoints acquired in ever-increasing resolution have to be stored, processed, and routed to the people who need them. Representatives from oil and gas companies, utilities, insurers, civil engineers, and a host of other industries stalked the floor at Xponential in search of systems that would let them inspect assets from a distance.
But because of current Federal Aviation Administration regulations, only a few of those industries have begun using uncrewed vehicles. One of the most well-established applications of drones outside the military is "precision agriculture," in which UAVs equipped with near-infrared and other sensors detect problems with crop health in high resolution. This data is subsequently used by automated, GPS-controlled chemical applicators. But while drones have been used in precision agriculture in Japan and other countries for over a decade, many US farmers who currently use drones to pinpoint where crops need to be fed or sprayed are "cowboys," as one drone manufacturer described them—not because they raise cattle, but because they flaunt the FAA's rules.
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