Drone inspections are nothing new, but Ford Motor Company is doing things differently than the rest. Drone flight is typically conducted outdoors where pilots have much more room to maneuver around structures taking various images. Employees at Ford instead are flying drones inside of their plant to keep workers safe.
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In Belmar, New Jersey, lifeguards are conducting tests using drones to assist them in helping swimmers back to land. According to CBS 3 Philly, the town of Belmar is looking to Rutgers University for help in a partnership to figure out how these rescues will work.
Usually, whenever drones and wildfires are in the news together it’s because these small aircraft are interfering with larger, manned aircraft tasked with delivering water and retardant to extinguish the flames. In a change of events, firefighters of South Oregon are using gas-powered drones to scan wildfire areas and detect hotspot during the night.
Lucid, Inc based in Raleigh, North Carolina is using drones to clean the exterior surfaces of buildings. Andrew Ashur and his two friends David Danielson and Adrian Mayans got the idea after seeing workers cleaning tall skyscrapers. They knew there had to be a safer, more efficient way to complete this task, so they began to put their plan into action.
The PHASA-35 is a high altitude, long endurance aircraft that is currently in development through a collaborative effort between BAE Systems and Prismatic. The two companies behind this UAV have their eyes set on the long haul with intentions to keep this aircraft airborne for over a year.
Airbus, a French company, has its eyes set on the unmanned aerial vehicle market with their Zephyr high altitude drone. You may be familiar with Airbus as a company who develops passenger aircraft, like the A380 that was recently captured by a drone while taking off, commercial jets, and even helicopters. Their goal is entirely different with this project as the Zephyr S and Zephyr T offer a wide range of possibilities.
A company out of North Dakota, SkySkopes, is a professional drone flight operator that specializes in delivering data to companies in the energy industry. Their new idea is helping companies string power lines between tall towers.
The use of drones commercially is skyrocketing around the globe with brand new ideas popping up in different countries. Companies like Matternet want to make peer-to-peer drone delivery common and Amazon wants to send your packages autonomously to your house via drones; but in the field of construction, drones are taking over by giving architects and builders crucial real-time data and 3D aerial maps from construction sites that was once expensive and difficult to obtain.
A commercial drone pilot from Rhode Island was making $2,000 a day back in 2015. Now he only gets about $175 dollars per day for the same work. Ever since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) started to allow commercial drone flights the unmanned aerial devices have come down in price while at the same time their capabilities have improved and the competition has increased tremendously resulting in dramatically lower prices. Noticeably, the new competition is not only from other smaller players but increasingly from large companies such as General Electric, Intel Corp., Verizon Communications and other well-funded startups like PrecisionHawk and Airware.
We first wrote about Yamaha and their agricultural or industrial drones when they were at CES2018 displaying the YMR-01. Today we learn that Yamaha will begin with limited sales of their industrial multi-rotor drone the YMR-08 aimed at agricultural use starting in June of this year in Japan.
Today we see a massive wind turbine being de-iced by a giant drone. The drone is developed by the Latvian firm Aerones. The industrial drone has 36 propellors and can carry payloads up to 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and since it tethered to the ground it can theoretically fly forever.
