![]() “Once the drone has a low latency, high bandwidth and a highly reliable connection to the cloud, the drone at that point only has to carry sensors – it doesn’t have to carry compute power.” “Cloud computing is going to really change the architecture of drones and actually greatly simplify the flying robots,” said Guinn. In addition to speeding up insights from data collected in the sky, cloud computing may impact the hardware of drones too. Even indoors, a drone can work with an edge computer to help manage a warehouse’s inventory. For security, a drone can deploy when an intruder is detected in a restricted area. When connected to cloud-computing, this data empowers farmers to make quicker, more informed decisions. In the agricultural industry, these stations can automatically alert farmers of problems with crops in their fields. “It comes out, takes all the images, then goes back into the box where there’s an edge computer,” Guinn said. Some companies employ drones in a box or an autonomous drone station (ADS), which is a self-contained edge computing container that deploys drones in regular intervals or as needed. They’re doing some computer vision and machine learning in the air and in real-time.” “They can do things like object recognition or object detection – they can detect rust on a bridge or see if vegetation and trees are growing on a power line. Now, many UAVs have edge computing onboard, said Guinn. It then took operational downtime for the software to make sense of the information that the drone had collected. Previously, drone operations relied exclusively on human middlemen to land the UAVs and transfer data from the devices into the cloud while on the ground. Getting information that you need, when you need it.” “You can have almost instantaneous situational awareness,” said Professor Johnson. “You’ll have faster time to realize accurate insights and information and real-time decisions can be made in the air.” “In the future, it will go from the drones’ imaging sensors straight to the cloud over 5G to be processed and stored in the cloud,” said Guinn, who is also the founder of Hangar Technology and is the former CEO of DJI in North America. The advent of a 5G network is essential to drones’ increased dependence on cloud computing, especially as fleets of drones work together to gather heaps of data at one time. Cloud becomes your learning step, and then edge becomes your evolution step.” “The cloud allows that inference and learning so you can make drones smarter – it's like an interactive cycle. ![]() “We are leveraging the ability of the cloud to learn faster, to iterate faster and to deploy,” Nanduri said. Intel uses edge and cloud computing for commercial companies in construction, oil and gas, and utilities. “Cloud has become the compute engine for large applications, and it's no different for the drone ecosystem.” “You're seeing a lot of processing move towards the cloud, just like any trends in the computer ecosystem,” said Nanduri. The cloud is perhaps the next frontier in expediting the drone workflow by helping companies synthesize data while the device is still airborne, according to Anil Nanduri, Vice President and General Manager of the Drone Group at Intel. “A drone is basically a way to position a high-resolution imaging sensor in places you couldn’t before.” Storing Drone Data “The whole point of a drone is you can fly a sensor around and capture data,” said Guinn. When coupled with edge or cloud computing, these hovering data collection devices provide faster insights, according to Colin Guinn, Founder of Guinn Partners, a drone consulting company. ![]() The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this drone revolution and the investment in making drones faster and more agile in data collection and processing. They can assist with predictive maintenance to increase uptime at a factory, ensure safety compliance at a commercial construction site, and fundamentally change the telecommunication industry. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are autonomous sensors in the sky, capturing high-resolution imagery that informs decision making with increased speed and efficiency, and decreased cost. “The drone is simply an autonomous data-gathering machine.” But where is drone data stored and how can it become an essential part of a company’s digital transformation? “Think of drones or any autonomous physical technology as a part or a node in a broader network that’s gathering data and is interconnected with cloud computing,” said Brian David Johnson, a futurist in residence and professor of practice at Arizona State University. Airborne drones allow people to photograph, video, map, survey and inspect where nobody can physically be, powering a vast world of industries with real-time insights. ![]() Data collection, once entirely Earth-bound, is no longer limited by physical capabilities. Surging through everyone’s pockets, homes, cars and skies is a never-ending flow of information. ![]()
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