What is a Drone
Drones have been around for some time and my first exposure was talking with my Father about his work as an Air Force pilot in the 60s on the Kelly Johnson lead Skunk Works D-21 drone program. Quite a bit has happened over the last 60 years (wow that is a long time) and when I think of drones, I think beyond what flies to include ships and the autonomous vehicle space.
I was a conference and one of the presenters noted it is the convergence of IoT (Internet of Things - ie data collection) and robotics which is pretty spot on from a raw perspective. That being said it will change many things in all of our lives from package delivery to how we get around in the future.
The pace of change continues to increase and we have seen tremendous strides over the last few years from the Tesla, Uber (both taxi and trucking applications), large companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft), Military to the new entrants like DJI, Yuneec, 3DR and GoPro (obviously many more).
With all this change, things will go wrong (injury, privacy loss, security issues etc...), and one question I have is who will be there as a neutral party to help all the entities involved. These include federal, state and local governments, the drone manufactures themselves, insurance companies, and research groups trying to get a grip on the rapid pace of change. Data becomes key here and what gets me excited is our ability to analyze the data with advanced tools that leverage artificial intelligence looking for insights that help keep us safe.
A drone is many things, disruptive, game changing, and additive.
