There are already 170,000 small, uncrewed aerial vehicles licensed in the US, and the US Federal Aviation Administration predicts another half-million more of them to be airborne by 2022.
Drones are everywhere, doing all sorts of things, including delivering hamburgers and beer to golfers. They are taking group photographs, scouting properties and being shot down by neighbors.
They are also competing, and the competition is serious. Lockheed Martin Corp has launched a US$2 million competition pitting human operators against artificial intelligence in races through obstacle courses at speeds of more than 128kph.
Tiny, sensor-laden electronics might sound like a game — but as Lockheed’s interest suggests, they should sound like business.
As the drone value chain improves — chip sets shrink, cameras become more advanced, machine learning techniques mature — it creates reasons to scale. At the same time, drone applications become ever more apparent.
Around the world, trillions of US dollars’ worth of industrial infrastructure is aging, while worker safety and terrorism concerns increase, and climate change increasingly strains power grids, manufacturing facilities, and oil and gas production.
Drones offer a cheaper and more effective way of monitoring infrastructure than traditional methods of sending workers to dangerous, remote terrain.
Drones are being used by grid companies to spot faults or overgrown foliage in transmission and distribution lines across the US.
Monitoring overgrowth is increasingly important in hot, dry areas increasingly prone to fire — such as in Northern California, where PG&E Corp might owe as much as US$17.3 billion in liabilities from last year’s fires in wine country.
Drones were also used by Duke Energy Corp to help restore power lines in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria knocked out 80 percent of the island’s electricity access.
Those threat-detection capabilities are money savers and power-restoration services can be literal lifesavers.
However, there is another set of services, more prosaic, but potentially just as significant, for the future: operations and maintenance.
New research from Bloomberg NEF (BNEF) assesses the economics of drone inspections in power plants, and oil and gas inspection.
At offshore wind farms, drone inspection might prevent significant failures resulting in downtime and lost revenues.
BNEF calculated that the use of drones on offshore wind farms in Europe could shave off more than US$1,000 per turbine per year in inspection costs — reducing the cost of producing electricity by 1 percent.
The same savings apply to solar farms, where drone inspection can lower costs even further, on a proportional basis.
As drones improve, so would the services that they can provide.
Drones that only collect video footage are limited to inspection.
With machine vision, enhanced sensors, and grabbing arms and probes, drones might be able to fix minor faults in wind turbines, clear away overgrown foliage and defend assets from intruders.
Advances in 3D vision and computational photography, cheaper communications networks, and lightweight batteries all promise to produce a drone that can fly for longer, act independently and replace dangerous or boring human labor.
The research also found that in-house drones are cheaper for inspection than third-party drone inspection as a service. Although in-house drone inspection requires upfront costs in training pilots and buying the drones, it has better economics than using a third-party service.
Then there is the world of oil and gas. Drones with potent “sniffers” can detect methane leaks coming from oil and gas pipelines at 1,000 times the accuracy of traditional methods, saving pipeline owners significant money that is lost from leaked product and potentially from fines.
Even this relatively simple application could have significant business — and pollution and climate — implications, as there is an enormous range of reported values of actual emissions in the oil and gas supply chain.
Not everything is immediately up and up for industrial drones. Regulation in most countries demands that drone pilots stay within line of sight of drones, while heavy batteries limit their flight time to 20 minutes. The market is fragmented, with a variety of start-ups offering complex services and overlapping solutions.
However, those conditions can and probably will change. Technology improves and regulations evolve.
That buzzing rotor sound overhead is economics. It is also business.
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has appointed Rose Castanares, executive vice president of TSMC Arizona, as president of the subsidiary, which is responsible for carrying out massive investments by the Taiwanese tech giant in the US state, the company said in a statement yesterday. Castanares will succeed Brian Harrison as president of the Arizona subsidiary on Oct. 1 after the incumbent president steps down from the position with a transfer to the Arizona CEO office to serve as an advisor to TSMC Arizona’s chairman, the statement said. According to TSMC, Harrison is scheduled to retire on Dec. 31. Castanares joined TSMC in
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the
FACTORY SHIFT: While Taiwan produces most of the world’s AI servers, firms are under pressure to move manufacturing amid geopolitical tensions Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) started building artificial intelligence (AI) servers in India’s south, the latest boon for the rapidly growing country’s push to become a high-tech powerhouse. The company yesterday said it has started making the large, powerful computers in Pondicherry, southeastern India, moving beyond products such as laptops and smartphones. The Chinese company would also build out its facilities in the Bangalore region, including a research lab with a focus on AI. Lenovo’s plans mark another win for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tries to attract more technology investment into the country. While India’s tense relationship with China has suffered setbacks