By David Davies:

Agriculture, Construction, mining!!

A drone, in a technological context, is an unmanned aircraft. Drones are more formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned aircraft systems (UASes). Essentially, a drone is a flying robot.

A scary example is STAR, a robotic surgeon. Many surgeries end up with complications, sometimes because the surgeon made a mistake. What if a robot performed the surgery?

Another great example below - watch the latest autonomous tractor developed by CNH Industrial. Believe me even if you are not in the agricultural space this video is still incredible to watch. 

Now flying robots have already been implemented in our daily work force. From thermal imaging security solutions, precision farming, stock counting on farms and even product stock counts in warehouses. Drones are taking off. As per a PWC report drones will replace $127 Billion worth of human labour and services across several industries. Infrastructure and agriculture making up $77.6 Billion between them. Click here for the PWC report. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, recently mentioned drones will become just as popular as cellphones. 

My friends  & customers -  I welcome you to the 4th Industrial revolution!

The Drone Age

Growing up I built remote control cars, drones and airplanes as a hobby. The improvements in cellphone technology however has been the real underlying reason for the rise of the drones. From improved GPS capability and sensors these advancements have really been the brain behind your drone. A very interesting point to take from what I just said there – essentially the hardware is irrelevant. I can build you a drone tomorrow – easy!  It’s the software that’s key. Why do we use drones – for reporting & to ultimately improve our decision making!

Now if you’re in the mining, agricultural or construction industries how do you make sure you’re making the best decisions, improving your crops yield, aggregates, stock pile management and most importantly staying ahead of your competitors. My answer to you is choose your drone hardware and software partners very carefully.

One of our most exciting partnerships is our exclusive agreement with Precision Hawk USA. As mentioned software is the real key to better management decisions within agriculture, insurance, mining and environment sectors. Precision Hawk DataMapper software allows you, the actual farmer or end user, to get analytics yourself. No need to outsource or call in specialists. (For software and product demonstrations specific to your industry email  me now – david@actiongear.co.za.)

We’ve bundled our Matrice 100’s with the DataMapper software. My recent trip to Precision Hawk, North Carolina USA also gave us insight to building specialist LIDAR gimbles for our Matrice 600 clients so we can now finally help facilitate South African customers.

Going back to my point of “are drones taking your jobs” – there is no real cause for panic, as technology advances there will always be a need for human operation and maintenance. Drones delivering parcels will create as much work for drone operaters as trucks do for courier drivers. The key is keeping up with technology and that’s exactly where Precision Hawk & Data Mapper fit in. This simple easy to use software allows you to build in house teams rather than out source. Allowing you to make critical decisions on site. My advice to my customers, such as Anglo American, have been to start drone divisions within their companies.  Below is also an example of the ROC structure required by the SACAA. Here we can see the promotion of jobs:

For software and product demonstrations specific to your industry contact me now – david@actiongear.co.za. We have product ready & available to purchase today.

Have a look below at some of the pictures (The ones I’m allowed to share) from my trip to Precision Hawk USA.