Here comes the war for drone dominance
At some point in the nottoo-distant future, fleets of commercial drones are expected to swarm across American skies. Companies in a wide range of industries will employ unmanned vehicles for tactical advantage-inspecting infrastructure, surveying crops, maybe even estimating how much your new roof will cost.
And when these drones fly, a torrent of data will follow them like an invisible contrail.
“Data is the new oil,” Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Brian Krzanich said week at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s annual Xponential conference in Dallas, the industry’s top trade show. He cited a growing competitive “separation” between companies that collect and understand their data and those that don’t.
A single autonomous car can generate the same data trove as 3,000 people surfing the internet, while a small drone fleet could easily create 150 terabytes of data per day, he said (1,000 gigabytes equals 1 terabyte). “The data rate is going to explode on us in the next few years,” Krzanich said.
But how to handle that wide open fire hose of information?
“Operation of an unmanned system is no longer a stand-alone activity,” Lockheed Martin Corp. proclaims in its promotional materials for its Hydra Fusion Tools software. “There [is] an assortment of maps, images, video, and intelligence which are being broadcast to the operators and this needs to be fused into a common operational picture.”
This proposition, unsurprisingly, is leading to an array of new business models aimed at helping companies sift through and exploit the mountains of information headed their way.