What can Drones do for you?

As a startup I would say you have really two options:

1. Take an existing market that has not adopted existing technology and apply that technology
2. Take a revolutionary new technology (one that has only become feasible in say the past 12 months) and apply it to an existing market

The rarest of companies will do both. They have deep knowledge of a stagnant industry and an appreciation for incoming trends that will shape the next 10 years of technology. Chris Dixon’s post is a great summary of what we can expect over the next 10 years. Nestled deep into that post is a bit about drones:

“Recreational videography will continue to be popular, but there will also be important commercial use cases. There are tens of millions of dangerous jobs that involve climbing buildings, towers, and other structures that can be performed much more safely and effectively using drones.”

And as much as I want to create a ‘Drone Swatter’ to chase down the drone that whirs its way through seemingly every beach I visit and plummet it into the ocean, the use cases for the technology haven’t even begun to be explored.

Last week I came across a company out of the latest TechStars Seattle batch that grabbed my attention and thought of ‘course this makes sense’ in the rare sense of applying a new technology to a stagnant industry.

Droneseed plans to replace the seasonal work of tree planters across North America by having drones perform the monotonous, and more importantly dangerous work of replanting large forests after they have been harvested.

On the surface this is a perfect business. Droneseed promises a 10x improvement in cost savings. You are removing the human risk associated with putting people in remote and often dangerous environments. However, there is a big issue that will need to be addressed for a successful implementation: Interaction with existing wildlife patterns.

I feel this could require as much as a 5 year cycle study. Much the project length of a pipeline or dam is often not restricted by actual construction timeline, but rather by the underling environmental studies that approve the adoption of the new technology.

It is certainly outside of the scope of Droneseed to consider, but there is also the issue of the 10s of thousands of tree planters that depend on annual contracts to survive. These people will need to be retrained into new roles or maybe they will be amongst the first to be part of the new “Basic Income” economy?

<rant>Any successful new startup will disrupt (cringe) an industry and often displace 1000s of jobs. Every time I step into an Uber, I secretly want to ask the driver if they are aware that Google placed a 258m investment into the company with the ultimate aim of utilizing its self driving technology to eliminate every single Uber driver from their workforce? Uber drivers are working for a company that actively trying to eliminate their job as quickly as they can. Such is the evolution of progress. I wonder how many drivers are even aware of this?</rant>

Back to drones!

Libraries like OpenCV will open up the possibilities for the type of object that a drone can identify and hence the type of work it can perform. As computer vision continues to improve here are a list of opportunities where I could see drones being successful:

1. Micro spraying of pesticides. Instead of spraying an entire crop, drones could identify suspect plants and apply only the appropriate amount of chemical required
2. Fire fighting, applying fire-retardant chemicals to areas that could potentially be caught in a blaze based on identifying the current burn conditions.
3. Fruit picking, another seasonal, monotonous job. Although much less dangerous than tree planting.
4. Litter picking, imagine if drones came out every night at 2am and cleaned your favorite beach or park so it was pristine for folks every single day.
5. Fishing, this one is admittedly based on the amount of time I spend on the beach and the number of times I see birds each day launching themselves towards the water’s surface to pluck a fish out of the sea. I could see a drone in that role.
6. There are numerous, obvious opportunities, involving cleaning or repairing bridges and buildings or basically any thing that puts a human life in a position of unnecessary risk.
7. Underwater drones that do repair work on offshore oil platforms or bridges (one of the highest paid and riskiest jobs in the world)

Clearly drones have a scope beyond delivering your next Amazon package or taking that sweeping beach video. The opportunities are immense, but so are the environmental and human implications.