Taking flight - The Economist · 2020-04-03 · Taking flight 20170610_TQciviliandrones.indd 1...

TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY June 10th 2017 CIVILIAN DRONES

Taking flight

20170610_TQciviliandrones.indd 1 30/05/2017 15:12

The Economist June 10th 2017 1

1

Taking flight

Most drones today are either cheap toys or expensive weapons. But interesting commercial uses arestarting to emerge in the middle, says Tom Standage

STARTING a riot at a football match. Reveal-ing an unknown monument in the desertnear Petra. Performing at the Super Bowl.Sneaking drugs and mobile phones into pri-sons. Herding elephants in Tanzania. Whatlinks this astonishing range of activities?

They are all things that have been done by small flyingrobots, better known as drones.

To most people a drone is one of two very differentkinds ofpilotless aircraft: a toy or a weapon. It is eithera small, insect-like device that can sometimes be seenbuzzing around in parks or on beaches, or a large mil-itary aircraft that deals death from the skies, allowingoperators in Nevada to fire missilesat terrorist suspectsin Syria. The first category, recreational drones aimedat consumers, are the more numerous by far; around2m were sold around the world last year. The secondcategory, militarydrones, account for the vast majority(nearly 90%) of worldwide spending on drones. Butafter a pivotal year for the civilian drone industry, aninteresting space is now opening up in the middle asdrones start to be put to a range ofcommercial uses.

Last year around 110,000 drones (technicallyknown as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs) weresold for commercial use, according to Gartner, a con-sultancy. That figure is expected to rise to 174,000 thisyear and the number of consumer drones to 2.8m. Al-

though unit sales of commercial drones are muchsmaller, total revenues from them are nearly twice asbig as for the consumer kind (see chart, next page).

In “Drones Reporting for Work”, published in 2016,Goldman Sachs, a bank, argued that drones are be-coming “powerful business tools”. It predicted that ofthe total of $100bn likely to be spent on both militaryand civilian drones between 2016 and 2020, the com-mercial segment would be the fastest-growing, nota-bly in construction (accountingfor$11.2bn), agriculture($5.9bn), insurance ($1.4bn) and infrastructure inspec-tion ($1.1bn). Oppenheimer, another bank, predictsthat the commercial market “will ultimately contrib-ute the majority ofUAV industry revenues”.

The rise of commercial drones was made possibleby three developments. First, fierce competition in theconsumer market has made the machines muchcheaper, more reliable and more capable than theywere just a few years ago. “These are not military pro-ducts that were downsized—these are consumer tech-nologies that got better,” says Brendan Schulman,head of policy at Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI), the Chi-nese firm that dominates the consumer-drone indus-try. DJI’s bestselling Mavic, which costs $999, can holdits position in light winds, detect obstacles and landautomatically. At a company office in Shenzhen, Shuo�ang, one of the engineers who worked on the Mavic,

ALSO IN THIS TQ

TECHNOLOGYGive and take

COMMERCIALAPPLICATIONSSeeing is believing

FUTURE USESCan drones deliver thegoods?

BRAIN SCANDario Floreano

REGULATIONRules and tools

TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY Civilian drones

2 The Economist June 10th 2017


2

1

proudly demonstrates that it can even respond to hand gestures tofollow its owner around or snap a “drone selfie”. And it folds up tofit into a backpack.

In many ways modern consumer drones are more advancedthan far more expensive military systems, says Adam Bry of Sky-dio, a consumer-drone startup that is developing a rival to theMavic. The best consumer models are now being redeployed forcommercial use, often with little or no modification. As previous-ly happened with smartphones, the fastest innovation is takingplace in the consumer market and then being adopted by compa-nies. And just as with smartphones, people who enjoyed playingwith consumerdrones realised it made sense to take them to worktoo, says Jonathan Downey of Airware, a startup that makesdrone-management software. Even military users are beginningto pay attention to developments in the consumer market.

Second, the proliferation of consumer drones in Americaprompted regulation from the Federal Aviation Administration(FAA), which had repeatedly delayed introducing rules for com-mercial drones. “The flood of consumer vehicles forced the regu-lators to allowcommercial use,” saysChrisAnderson of3D Robot-ics, another drone startup. (Mr Anderson is a former editor-in-chief of Wired, and previously worked at The Economist.) A set ofrules known as “part 107”, issued by the FAA in August 2016, spec-ifies the conditions under which drones can be used commercial-ly; previously commercial use had been allowed only with a spe-cial waiver that was costly and time-consuming to obtain. Thedefault thus switched from “commercial use is illegal” to “com-mercial use is legal under the following conditions”. Many othercountries follow the FAA’s regulatory lead, so this cleared com-mercial drones for take-off not just in America but worldwide.Still, “the technology is moving so fast that the regulatory and le-gal frameworks are having a hard time keeping up,” says AstroTeller ofX, Google’s semi-secret research laboratory.

Third, the industry underwent a shake-out as a crowd of jost-ling startups came to be dominated by DJI. Based in Shenzhen,where the world’s technology firms go to develop and manufac-ture hardware, DJI outperformed both local and foreign rivals andnow has about 70% of the consumer-drone market. It is valued ataround $8bn and has established itself as a global, premiumbrand with a reputation for quality and reliability, defying the ste-reotype ofChinese firms. Its consumer drones generally cost $999to start with and are subsequently discounted as new models ap-pear. DJI also makes slightly heftier models specifically for com-mercial use; a fully equipped Inspire 2 costs around $6,000.

Several rival dronemakers, including Autel, GoPro, Parrot andYuneec, have announced lay-offs in recentmonths. Lily, a consum-er-drone startup that attracted thousands of pre-orders, shutdown in January. 3D Robotics laid off 150 workers and stoppedmaking hardware altogether last year after its Solo drone failed todent DJI’s market share. Many drone startups concluded that in-

stead of competing with DJI on hardware, it makes more sense tocomplement its products by providing software and services forcommercial users. “Everyone is moving to a model where we letDJI control mostofthe on-board stuffand we move all our innova-tion up the stack to the cloud,” says Mr Anderson.

Pause forreflectionHaving jumped, funding for drone startups is now maintaining aroughly stable altitude. In 2015 drone firms attracted $479m in ven-ture capital, up from $149m the year before, according to CB In-sights, a research firm; last year the total fell slightly to $452m.Some investors had their fingers burned and were put off, says Pe-ter Harrop of IDTechEx, a consultancy. “People are distracted bytoydrones,” he notes. Butbeyond the consumermarket, a wide ar-ray of potential uses is emerging in construction, agriculture andother industries, as well as public safety.

More speculative uses are on the horizon. Amazon, Googleand several startups are developing drones for delivering pack-ages. Facebook is working on a giant drone to provide internet ac-cess in remote areas. Energy utilities are looking at generatingpower using high-altitude tethered drones that act as flying windturbines. Tiny insect-like drones may one day pollinate plants; bigones might carry not just cargo but people in self-flying sky taxis.

This report will focus on the fastest-growing part of the dronebusiness, namely the commercial market in between small, cheapconsumer drones on the one hand and large, expensive militaryones on the other. It will consider the evolving technology and theemerging opportunities, and examine the new challenges thatdrones pose for regulators. Having come from nowhere in just afew years, civilian drones are now taking flight. 7

THE first drones were military. The use of pilotless flyingmachines as weapons dates back to the siege of�enicein 1849, when Austrian forces launched balloons ladenwith explosives against the city. But the origin of mili-tary drones is usually dated to the development of un-crewed, remote-controlled aircraft for use as targets by

anti-aircraft gunners after the first world war. The first truly suc-cessful example was the de Havilland DH82B Queen Bee, whichentered service in Britain in 1935 and seems to have been the inspi-ration for calling such aircraft “drones” (after stingless male bees);Germany’s V-1flying bomb was another early drone.

In recent years drones have become a vital component of airpower. America’s armed forces have a fleet of more than 11,000drones, compared with just a handful in 2001. Peter Singer of theNew America Foundation, a think-tank, says around 80 countriesnow have military drones, including about 20 with armed ones,either already in use or in development. But the vast majority areunarmed surveillance aircraft ofvarious shapes and sizes.

At one end of the spectrum are small, hand-launched fixed-wing surveillance drones such as the Raven, Wasp and Puma, allmade by Aer��ironment, which fly either autonomously or un-der short-range remote control. The Raven, used by many coun-tries’ armed forces, is the world’s most widely used military UAV,with around 20,000 unitsdeployed; it can flyforup to 90 minutes.

Technology

Give and take

Originally a military technology, drones are now benefitingfrom rapid advances in consumer electronics



2

1

Larger drones like the Predator and Reaper can typically stay aloftfor 12-20 hours and carry weapons. Biggest of all are long-endur-ance, high-altitude reconnaissance drones such as the NorthropGrumman Global Hawk, which can loiter over an area for 32hours, longer than any human pilot.

Perhaps surprisingly, the recent rise of consumer drones oweslittle to military systems. Instead, it springs from two completelydifferent technologies: hobbyists’ radio-controlled (RC) aircraft onthe one hand and smartphones on the other. Many people work-ing in the drone industry started out flying small RC aircraft pow-ered by tiny petrol engines, which were “annoying, messy and su-per-finicky”, says Adam Bry of Skydio. The combination ofbrushless electric motors and lithium-polymer batteries, used inlaptops and smartphones, allowed RC aircraft to be electricallypowered, making them lighter, quieter and more reliable.

Cheap microcontroller chips, which allow a small computer tobe squeezed into a box the size of a cigarette packet, led to the de-velopment of open-source autopilot software for fixed-wing hob-byist aircraft. Microcontrollers also provided the on-board brainsfor a new design of drone, with four or more helicopter-style ro-tors. By 2005 several research groups had figured out how a dronewith four vertical-axis rotors could control its position and move-ment by adjusting the speeds of differentrotors—much easier than controlling a tra-ditional helicopter. “That enabled a com-pletely new way for drones to fly around,hover and so on,” says Dario Floreano, aroboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute ofTechnology in Lausanne.

But for all this to work, a quadcopterneeded to know its orientation and direc-tion of movement. Serendipitously, theprice of accelerometers based on micro-electromechanical systems, used as tiltsensors in smartphones, had come downrapidly. Drones also borrowed small,cheap camera sensors and fast Wi-Fi chipsfrom smartphones. Moreover, handsetsloaded with suitable apps could be used asdrone-control units, taking advantage ofthe phone’s screen, radio and processingpower. “Drones have really been riding thesmartphone revolution,” says Dr Floreano.

The stability of multirotor flight meantthat small electrically powered aircraft

could suddenly be used in all kinds of new ways, beyond whatwas possible with small fixed-wing aircraft. Researchers weresoon getting small multirotor drones to form amazing feats ofagil-ity. In a popular online video from 2013, Raffaello D’Andrea, a ro-boticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich,demonstrates quadcopters balancing broomhandles, carrying aglass of water without spilling a drop and returning ping-pongballs by hitting them in mid-air. Eight of Dr D’Andrea’s drones, re-sembling flying lampshades, even perform in “Paramour”, aBroadway show by Cirque du Soleil.

And formy next tricks…Military drones are built to survive in demanding conditions,have special requirements (such as stealth capabilities or long en-durance) and tend to be expensive. So although makers of mili-tary drones are keen to adapt some of their products for civilianuse, commercial drones are more likely to be based on scaled-upconsumer drones than on scaled-down military ones. Gartner es-timates that military suppliers will capture just 10% of the com-mercial-drone market by 2020. The drones being put to commer-cial use now “are pretty much all consumer”, says Mr Bry.

For their part, military types are paying increasing attention toconsumer-drone technology, particularly for indoor use in urbancombat. “We’re interested in havingsomething that can operate ina building, in a confined space,” says a NATO spokesman. And astheiradversariesadopt low-costdrones (IslamicState has used off-the-shelf consumer drones in Iraq for surveillance and to drop ex-plosives), Western armed forces are trying to workout how to stopthem reliably and inexpensively. A member of Britain’s specialforces says that a shotgun is currently the simplest method.

Military and consumer drones alike are being transformed byrapid progress in two cutting-edge areas of drone research: auton-omy and swarming. If you automate away the need for a skilledoperator, drones suddenly become much more useful. Militaryones that do not require the oversight of a human operator can beradio silentand stealthier. Consumeronescan followrunners, ski-ers or cyclists and film them from above. Commercial ones can flya specific, pre-planned path over a field, building site or quarry,avoiding obstacles as they gather data. Improved flight-control al-gorithms, more on-board processing power and progress in mach-ine vision will allowdrones to handle more decisions themselves,rather than relying on fallible or inexpert humans. Most existingdrones simply move the pilot from the vehicle to the ground. Thenext generation ofdrones will not need pilots at all–just orders.

Greater autonomy also opens the way to swarms of drones

Churchill with the Queen Bee, the mother of all drones



2

1

PHOENIX DRONE SERVICES, operating from a businesspark on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, is typical ofthe small firms thathave sprungup in recentyears to pur-sue the commercial opportunities around drones. Itsfounders, Mark Yori and Brian Deatherage, started off bybuilding radio-controlled planes. To stream live video,

they modified a baby monitor and attached its camera to a fixed-wing drone. These were the days of“crash, smash, rebuild and tryagain”, Mr Deatherage recalls. Then in 2011 they used a drone-mounted smartphone to take some pictures, for which they werepaid $200. “That’s a business,” Mr Yori concluded, and their com-pany was born, one of the first permitted to operate drones com-mercially under a “section 333 exemption” granted by the FederalAviation Administration.

In the company’s offices, fixed-wing and multirotor drones ofvarious shapes and sizes hang on the walls like hunting trophies.A technician surrounded by tools and components tends to a half-built drone in a workshop area; a black DJI hexacopter sits on a ta-ble, poised like some giant insect. For years Mr Deatherage and Mr�ori built their own drones, and still use custom-built aircraft for

some types ofwork. “In the beginning you had to be able to buildand repair your own aircraft,” says Mr Deatherage, who has acomputingdegree and taught himselfhow to use the various toolsto process the data from his drones.

Mr�

ori likens the fast-moving drone business to surfing: “�

oualways have to be ready to catch the next wave,” he says. Therehave already been several waves of enthusiasm for drones, as va-rious industries have woken up to their potential and small firmshave rushed to meet theirneeds. The introduction ofthe “part107”rules in America last year has removed the previously formidable

barrier to entry for commercial-drone operators. The industry isnow looking for the most promising applications and trying togauge how the market will evolve.

The first commercial use of drones (and still their main use forconsumers) was to act as flying cameras. Over the past 150 yearscameras have changed shape from bulky wood-and-brass con-traptions to handheld devices and then smartphones. In manyways drones are the logical next step in their evolution. It is tellingthat GoPro, a company known for its indestructible action cam-eras, recently launched its first drone; and that DJI, the dominantmaker of consumer drones, has acquired a majority stake in Has-selblad, an iconic Swedish camera firm. Using drones for photo-graphy is much cheaper than using manned helicopters. Aerialshots have proliferated on television in recent years, and are alsopopular with property agents and for dramatic wedding videos.

Eye in the skyPaul XuofDJI listsphotographyasone offive areasofopportunityfor commercial drones, along with agriculture, construction, in-spection, and public safetyand othercivil-governmentuses. Onceyou have a flying camera, there are lots of things you can do withit. Agriculture, and measuring the health of crops in particular,was identified early on as a promising market for commercialdrones. Crop health can be assessed by taking pictures using spe-cial multispectral cameras which “see” more than the human eye.Bymeasuring the relative intensityofcolour in particular frequen-cy bands, they can identify undernourished or diseased crops.This can be done by satellite, or by sending people into fields withclipboards, but drones can do it more cheaply. A GPS-equippedtractor can then precisely spray water, fertiliser or pesticides onlywhere needed, increasing yields and reducing chemical run-off.

In a report published in 2013 the Association for Unmanned�ehicle Systems International (AUVSI), an industry body, identi-

fied precision agriculture as by far the most promising market forcommercial drones. But enthusiasm for drones in agriculture hascooled lately. In part, that isbecause at the time ofthe AUVSI reportmost civilian drones were of the fixed-wing variety, ideally suitedto flying over large areas; the rapid progress made since then bymultirotor drones, which have a shorter range but can hover,opened up other markets that are now seen as more promising.

Encouraging farmers to adopt drones also proved harder thanexpected, notes Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics. The agriculturaluse of drones sounds good in theory—feed the world, save theplanet—but is difficult in practice. The market is very fragmentedand conservative, with many subsidies and distortions, and some

of the social goods that flow from usingdrones, such as reducing run-off of chemi-cals, do not benefit farmers directly. The ag-ricultural market “is littered with strug-gling technology companies that havetried to break in”, says Jonathan DowneyofAirware.

MrAnderson believes that the most im-mediate opportunity lies in constructionand related industries. Most big construc-tion projects go way over budget and endin a lawsuit, he says. Mistakes made earlyon in a project may not be noticed untilmuch later, and cost time and money torectify. . Buildings are designed in a flaw-less digital environment but must be con-structed in the much messier real world.“It’s all an information problem,” says MrAnderson. So the industry has been pursu-ing the idea of“reality capture”, using tech-nology to measure buildings precisely dur-ing construction and track the use of rawmaterials on site to ensure that everything

Commercial applications

Seeing is believing

Today’s drones are mostly flying cameras. They are alreadybeing put to a wide range of business uses

Variousindustrieshave wokenup to thepotential ofdrones

that act as a single unit. In a test carried out in October 2016 overCalifornia, 104 tiny fixed-wing Perdix drones, with a wingspan of30cm, were launched from three American fighters and per-formed a series of manoeuvres. This is the shape of things tocome, says Mr Singer. A swarm of small military drones might bereleased into a theatre of operations, spread out to look for targetsand then collectively assign tasks to different drones within theswarm. When one target has been destroyed, the swarm canmove on to another. Away from the battlefield, too, some tasks,such as search-and-rescue missions or mapping, might best bedone by drone swarms. They are already used in entertainment:300 Shooting Star drones, made by Intel, perform a regular lightshow at Disney World in Florida.

Getting swarms to collaborate, avoid collisions and cope withthe odd failure is no mean feat. But as the technology advances,says Mr Singer, the prospect of autonomous military swarms isrunning into both ethical objections—there is no human “in theloop” to make life-or-death decisions—and cultural resistancefrom military typeswho want to retain a role forhuman pilotsandtraditional aircraft. (Tanks faced similar objections in the firstworld war, when they were initially seen merely as an adjunct toinfantry.) Such constraints do not apply in the business world,however, where companies see ever more potential in drones asthey become smarter, more numerous and more capable. 7



2

1

is goingaccordingto plan. Dronesare ideal-ly suited to the task. Thousands of aerialphotographs are crunched into a 3D sitemodel, accurate to within a few centi-metres, called a “point cloud”, which canbe compared with the digital model of thebuilding. And safety worries that hamperthe use of drones in other fields are kept toa minimum because construction sites areclosed areas, workers wear hard hats, anddrones fly within line ofsight.

Andrew Kahler of John Deere, a makerof agricultural and construction machin-ery, explains how drones can also stream-line the process of grading—preparing theground for constructing a building, road orrailway. This involves measuring the origi-nal topography, which by conventionalmethods might take several weeks for alarge site; using bulldozers and otherequipment to move large quantities ofearth; then “fine grading” the site to withinan inch or two of the desired final shape.The great benefit ofdrones, says Mr Kahler,is that they can carry out a topographic survey in half an hour, andthe 3D model is ready the next day. That makes it possible to resur-vey the site frequently and make any necessary changes. Mr Kah-ler’s company recently strucka partnership with Kespry, a startup,to provide drones and related software and services.

Keep away from the cliffedgeDrones are also useful fartherup the construction supply chain, inminingand aggregates, says George Mathew, Kespry’s boss. Work-ing out how much material is sitting in a stockpile in a mine orquarry usually involves taking a few dozen measurements withmanual surveying equipment and then calculating the volume. Adrone can measure the volume of dozens of stockpiles in a singleflight, taking thousands of measurements that are turned into anaccurate point cloud within an hour. As well as being far quickerand more accurate, it isalso much safer. Fallingoffstockpiles isoneof the industry’s biggest occupational hazards. Using drones tosurvey quarries and building sites also means human surveyorsdo not need to venture close to dangerous sheer drops.

Such is the interest in drones, says Mr Kahler, that he is askedabout them at every site he visits. Customers are “ready and will-ing to jump into this technology”, he says. Sarah Hodges of Auto-desk, which makes software used to design and model buildings,notes that drones are making it possible to digitise the construc-tion industry, which has been relatively slow to adopt new tech-nology. With a complex building like a hospital, being able tocheck that plumbing, heating and electrical systems are being in-stalled correctly “is really transforming—it’s eliminating a lot of er-rors”. In China, she says, drones are being flown over buildingsites at night (which current American rules forbid) to measureprogress made during the previous day and ensure that every-thing is going precisely to plan. Autodeskand others are also start-ing to use virtual reality and augmented reality to overlay digitalmodels with real-world views.

Drones are attracting interest in a related field, too: the inspec-tion of buildings and other infrastructure, such as pipelines, windturbines, electrical pylons, solar farms and offshore platforms. Atthe moment, inspecting a roof for storm damage or checking thestate ofan electrical pylon involves sending someone up a ladder,which can be dangerous. “We are working with a lot of powercompanies,” says Mr Xu of DJI. His company has developed theMatrice 200, a drone specially equipped for use in harsh environ-ments by adding features like backup batteries and GPS systems,magnetic shielding and weatherproofing.

But for utilities and other large companies to make the most ofdrones, theyneed to be able to integrate them smoothly with theirexisting computer systems and workflows. A single drone flightcan generate as much as 100 gigabytes of data, says Anil Nanduriof Intel. Airware, which is working with large insurance compa-nies in Europe and America, has developed a system that handlesthe whole process. The insurance company specifies what data itwants, and in what format, and Airware’s software generates asuitable flight plan. This is sent to an operator who uploads it intothe drone, which gathers the required data completely autono-mously. The results are then sent back, converted into the formneeded by the claims assessor and a summary is delivered intothe insurance company’s systems. What makes the insurance in-dustry particularly attractive, says Mr Downey of Airware, is thatit is highly concentrated: “By working with the top ten players youcan target a pretty big proportion of the market.”

Inspection by drone will get even better with further automa-tion, says Mr Xu. Some dream of “drone in a box” systems, wheredrones sit charging in weatherproof boxes in remote areas, pop-ping out when needed to gather data entirely autonomously. Theuse of machine-learning systems to identify anomalies couldautomate the process even further. Kespry, which is also targetingthe inspection and insurance market, has built a machine-learn-ing system that can count hail strikes on a roof. “It’s mind-blowingfor people in property and casualty insurance,” says Mr Mathew.

After a flood or an earthquake, drones are already used insearch-and-rescue operations to sweep large areas forpeople whoneed help. By enabling relief workers to see the bigger picture,they allow relief efforts to be co-ordinated more effectively. Afterflash floods in Chennai, India, in December 2015, for example, thepolice used drones to locate and rescue around 200 people. A trialcarried out in 2016 by Donegal Mountain Rescue in Ireland foundthat a drone could sweep an area for a missing person more thanfive times faster than a ground-based team of rescuers. In Febru-ary four skiers in British Columbia, who got lost and ended up inthe dark, were spotted and rescued with the help of an infra-redcamera mounted on a DJI Matrice drone.

For police use, drones are a cheaper and quieter alternative tohelicopters for monitoring crowds and can be used to create de-tailed 3D models to help investigators of traffic accidents. Journal-ists and environmental groups are also experimenting withdrone-based photography. Fixed-wing drones monitor animalpopulations and detect and deter poachers in Kenya, Namibia,South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe; multirotor drones

Up in the air, down on the farm



2

1

keep an eye out for sharks offAustralian beaches.As drones expand into all these areas, what shape will the in-

dustry take? Some drone startups took a “vertical” approach, fo-cusing on specific industries and creating integrated drone hard-ware, software and services for particular applications, as Kesprydoes in mining. Others, like Airware, bet that hardware from dif-ferent makers would become standardised around a single droneoperating system that would run on a wide range of designs fromdifferent vendors, just as Google’s Android operatingsystem pow-ers most of the world’s smartphones. Some companies focusedon making specific components, such as sensors, complete droneairframes, or software tools to analyse data from drones.

For the moment the commercial drone industry does not lookremotely like the smartphone industry; instead, it is a mirror im-age of it. DJI so dominates the hardware side that its on-board soft-ware has emerged as the industry’s main platform. The leadingsoftware platform for drones thus belongs to a single companyand is tied to itsown hardware; it iswhat the smartphone industrywould look like ifApple’s market share were 80% rather than 20%.An equivalent of Android for drones does exist—a free, open-source platform called Dronecode, used by 3D Robotics, Yuneec,Intel, Parrot and others—but DJI’s platform is more widely used.

Once itbecame apparent thatDJI’shardware and software wasemerging as the standard, many drone companies switched theirfocusto buildingenterprise-grade software and services forspecif-ic industries—an area that DJI seems happy to leave to others, giv-en that some companies might prefer not to hand over their datato a Chinese company. For software providers the vertical modelis winning, as startups target clients in particular industries.

Start hereBut how, in practice, will companies adopt drones? Initially, theymay choose to pay drone-services companies to workfor them ona job-by-job basis. Matchmaking services like Measure, Drone-Base, Fairfleet and Airstoc have already sprungup to connect com-panies that want to get a particular taskdone by drones with smallfirms and individuals who can do it for them. DJI has a stake inDroneBase, and some makers of drone software, including Air-ware and DroneDeploy, operate similar services. But this may justbe an interim solution. “Companiesusuallywant to startbyhiringa service provider,” says MrDowney, “and then they see how easyit is, and realise they can do it themselves.”

Drone companies, for their part, have been forming partner-ships with incumbent suppliers, notably in the construction in-dustry, which already have access to a large customer base. Hencepartnerships have been formed (many of them underpinned byan equity stake) between Kespry and John Deere, 3D Robotics andAutodesk, Airware and Caterpillar, and Skycatch and Komatsu.

Mr Xu of DJI reckons that more needs to be done to promotegrowth in the industry over the next five to ten years, so his com-pany is fostering insurance, repair and financing services fordrones that corporate customers are likely to want. With full auto-mation some years away, it is also encouraging the training ofdrone operators. “We are transforming this from a hobby to a pro-fession,” says Mr Xu. So far DJI’s training schemes, launched inJune 2016 and outsourced to third parties, are available only inChina. Each month 500-600 people are certified for particularkinds ofdrone operation, such as photography, pesticide sprayingor infrastructure inspection. The company is also trying to assiststartups that act as “UAV systems integrators”, helping companiesin particular industries integrate drones into their business.

Thus many overlapping models and initiatives are competingto shape the future of the drone business. Mr Downey thinks thatconsolidation over the next five years will leave a couple ofdomi-nant providers in each industry. But in essence, all the commercialapplicationsbeingpursued todayuse drones to gatherdata. As themachines become more capable, they will start moving thingsaround, which will give rise to a vast range ofnew uses. 7

THERE is a striking disparity between the commercial ap-plications drone companies are pursuing in fields likeconstruction, inspection or agriculture and the publicperception of commercial drones. Media coverage isdominated by one particular application: delivery. Ex-perimental deliveries of parcels, pizzas and other items

conjure up visions ofskies abuzz with drones ferryingpackages toand fro. But although delivery and logistics companies are inter-ested in drones, many drone companies are not interested in de-liveries. “It’s not on our immediate radar,” says Paul Xu ofDJI.

Astro Teller, the bossofX, Google’s semi-secret research labora-tory, is one of the lucky few to have received a delivery by drone. Itwas dispatched last September as part of a test carried out��ir-ginia by Project Wing, Google’s drone-delivery programme. Itsmachines come in a variety of shapes: some are “tail-sitters”, fly-ing wings capable of flipping upright and hovering; others arefixed-wing drones augmented by vertical-axis rotors like those ona quadcopter. Both designs combine the benefits of a fixed-wingaircraft for efficient long-distance flight with those of a multirotorfor hovering and vertical take-off and landing. When delivering apackage the drones do not actually land but float above the recipi-ent and use a winch to lower their cargo: in DrTeller’s case, a fresh-ly prepared burrito.

Receiving something by drone is “kind of magical”, he says,launching into an impassioned case for drone delivery. Imagineyou had a magic elf that could bring you anything you asked for

Future uses

Can drones deliver thegoods?The wait for cargo-carrying drones may be longer thanexpected

Lunch has arrived



2

1

within a minute or two, provided it could fit in a breadbin. Youwould no longer worry about what to take with you when goingout. Nor would you keep common items, like batteries or perish-able foodstuffs, on hand at home just in case you needed them.You might not need to own some rarely used objects at all if youcould summon them when needed. Rapid drone delivery couldthus accelerate the trend from ownership to access in the “sharingeconomy”, says Dr Teller. He claims delivery drones could be fast-er, quieter and more environmentally friendly than large deliverytrucks. Project Wing now carries out experimental flights daily.

The technology giant most closely associated with deliverydrones is Amazon. When its boss, JeffBezos, revealed his plans fordrones in December 2013 on “60 Minutes”, an American televi-sion programme, they were widely assumed to be a publicitystunt. But Amazon is quite serious: it carried out its first trial deliv-ery to a customer near Cambridge, England, last December—“13minutes from clickto delivery,” says GurKimchi, the head ofAma-zon’s drone effort. In March 2017 it conducted its first delivery de-monstration in America, at a conference in Palm Springs. LikeGoogle, Amazon is evaluating a range of different designs, all ofwhich involve the drone lowering its package onto a target in therecipient’s garden or backyard. Logistics firms such as DHL andUPS, as well as some startups, are also looking at drone delivery.

But if widespread drone delivery is to become a reality, manytechnical and regulatory hurdles must be overcome. These in-clude ensuring that drones do not fall and cause injury, and canland safely if something goes wrong; and preventing collisionswith power lines, trees and other aircraft. Moreover, small droneshave limited cargo-carrying capacity; not everyone has a gardenor backyard; and deliveries require beyond-line-of-sight, autono-mous operation, which requires special permission. So at least fornow, many drone firms are steering clear. “It’s very challenging,and we do not want to promise something we can’t deliver,” saysMr Xu. “Delivery just bundles together all the hard problems,”says Mr Bry, who worked on Project Wing before leaving to foundSkydio. He thinks it could take a decade to solve these problems.

One application where drone delivery may make more sense,and is already in use, is ferrying medicalsupplies to remote areas that are hard toreach by road. Zipline, an American start-up staffed by veterans of Google, SpaceX,Boeing and NASA, began delivering medi-cal supplies in rural Rwanda using fixed-wing drones in October 2016. It has anagreement with the government to deliverblood products to 21 transfusion clinicsfrom two bases, the first of which is al-ready serving five clinics. Zipline’s dronescan fly 150km on a single charge and workin rain and winds of up to 30km an hour.They are launched using a catapult, fly be-low 150 metres (500 feet) and drop cargopackages weighing1.5kg by parachute.

Rolling out the service means mappingthe best routes for the aircraft, which fly au-tonomously, co-ordinating with militaryand civilian authorities, trainingclinic staffto receive cargo and reassuring the localcommunities along the route. Whether allthis is economically viable, or just a public-ity stunt by Rwanda’s tech-loving govern-ment, isunclear. But the companyis talkingto governments in other countries aboutoperating similar services, focusing onmedical deliveries outside urban areas. Ithopes to change public perceptions of theword “drone”. Zipline’s Justin Hamiltonsays one of the firm’s engineers once told

him thathe used to workon drones thatdrop bombs, “and nowhebuilds drones that drop blood.”

Otherstartups say that drone delivery in urban areas is alreadypossible—but using drones moving on the ground rather than inthe air. Starship Technologies, based in Estonia, and Dispatch,based in California, have both developed wheeled, coolbox-sizeddrones that trundle along pavements to make local deliveries.Starship’s drones are being tested in several cities around theworld, and Dispatch is about to begin tests in the San FranciscoBay Area. Both firms use a “partial autonomy” model, meaningthat their drones can be remotely piloted for some or all ofa route.As the drone approaches its destination, the recipient receives asmartphone alert, and when it arrives he uses his phone to popopen a lockable compartment to retrieve the cargo.

What if people steal the drone? Anyone who tries, says StavBraun of Dispatch, has “just stolen a homing beacon”. A biggerconcern, she says, is ensuring that the robot is courteous and peo-ple feel safe around it. But so far the response has been positive.

Instant gratificationClement Jambou of Unsupervised.ai, a French delivery-dronestartup, thinks the steps and kerbs of urban environments will betoo difficult for wheeled robots to navigate, so his firm’s deliverydrone has legs instead and resembles a dog. He may disagree withDr Teller on the best way to set about it, but Mr Jambou has a verysimilar vision for fast, cheap drone delivery. For example, he ima-gines people renting rather than buying clothes, tools and otherhousehold items, dispatched by drone from a neighbourhood de-pot when needed.

Dr Teller, for his part, is confident that the technical and safetyobstacles to flying delivery drones can be overcome. But it will bea gradual process involving “lots of data and demonstration” tosatisfy regulators. “The magical elfwon’t change the world unlessit can go beyond visual line-of-sight, fly over people and have asmall number ofoperators responsible for a large number ofvehi-cles,” he says, none ofwhich is allowed undercurrent regulations.Google is working on making its drones resilient to the failure of asingle rotor, battery or motor, the loss of GPS coverage and otherpotential problems. “We are building up evidence that we can dothis safely,” he says. That will take a while, but Google expects its“moonshots” to take up to a decade to pay off. Work on ProjectWing began in 2012.

The disagreement over the viability ofdelivery drones, then, ismostly a matter of timing. For companies that wish to put dronesto worknow, delivery isnota good bet. But for logistics companiesit makes sense to start exploring the possibilities. The end resultmay well be a hybrid system of delivery trucks that arrive in a



2

1

Dario Floreano

A pioneer of evolutionary robotics borrows drone designs from nature

THE drones that most people are familiarwith today are “very boring”, declaresDario Floreano, head of the Laboratoryof Intelligent Systems at the Swiss FederalInstitute ofTechnology in Lausanne. Hethinks that drones will come in a muchwider range ofshapes and sizes in future,and that nature will provide the inspira-tion needed to make them more agile,safer and more capable. “There is spacefor an enormous range ofmorphologiesand sensing capabilities,” he says, givinga slightly worrying example: vampirebats. As well as flying, they can also walk,jump and even run along the ground. DrFloreano and his colleagues have builtbat-like drones with folding wings, andlocust-like ones that can jump and fly.

A pioneer in the field ofevolutionaryrobotics, which borrows ideas fromnature, Dr Floreano became interested indrones as a result ofhis workon insect-inspired vision systems. Curved com-pound “eyes”, which (like insect eyes)can “see” in many directions, turn out tobe useful in helping a drone sense itssurroundings, navigate and avoid obsta-cles, for example. Dr Floreano’s workonfixed-wing drones, with stabilisation andautopilot systems inspired by the waybees navigate, was spun offinto a startupcalled SenseFly, now part ofParrot, a

French drone company. SenseFly’s mainproduct is a black-and-yellow fixed-wingmapping drone called eBee.

Birds are another inspiration. DrFloreano’s team recently publishedresearch on the benefits ofadding artifi-cial feathers to fixed-wing drones. Byspreading its feathers, the drone canincrease the surface area of its wing,

letting it trade speed for manoeuvrability.But not everything needs to be borrowedfrom nature. Flyability, another spin-outfrom Dr Floreano’s lab, makes a “collision-tolerant” drone that resembles a flyingspherical cage, for mapping and inspec-tion in confined spaces.

These sorts ofunconventional ap-proaches enable drones to do things thatexisting designs cannot. Dr Floreanoimagines search-and-rescue drones capa-ble ofperching on walls or landing onpower lines, like birds, to survey theirsurroundings. This “multi-modal” ap-proach could also increase the safety ofdelivery drones by allowing them to glide,land or perch if something goes wrong.Multirotor drones can carry a maximumof30% of their total mass as payload, henotes, so to carry useful amounts ofcargothey will have to be quite large and heavy.

At very small scales, fixed-wing andmultirotor designs become less efficient,and insect-like drones with flapping wingsmay make more sense. Tiny drones couldbe used for virtual tourism, letting remoteusers “fly” around with the aid ofvirtual-reality goggles. In short, today’s dronedesigns barely scratch the surface. “Thereis a huge range ofshapes and sizes that wehave to explore,” says Dr Floreano. “Futuredrones may lookvery different.”

Brain scan

neighbourhood and disgorge flying and wheeled drones.Deliveries are just one of the proposed uses of drones that

seem speculative or impractical now but may become significantin future. Facebook, like Google and Amazon, is also investing indrones, but not for delivery: instead its drone, called Aquila, is ahuge solar-powered machine intended as a communications re-lay, to extend internet access to parts ofthe world that lackconnec-tivity. This will have health and educational benefits, the social-media giant says, but will also help it sign up more users. Aquilamade its first test flight in June 2016. Facebook’s boss, MarkZucker-berg, explained in a blog post afterwards that his goal is “a fleet ofAquilas flying together at 60,000 feet, communicating with eachother with lasers and staying aloft for months at a time”, beaminginternet access over wide areas.

Making all this work is a lofty goal. In November it emergedthat the prototype Aquila had been substantially damaged onlanding, triggering an investigation by flight-safety inspectors.And getting permission to fly such aircraft over any populated ar-eas will not be easy. In January Google scrapped its own high-alti-tude communications-relay drone, Titan.

Dr Teller says that Google now sees more promise for extend-ing internet access in high-altitude balloons; they are easier tokeep airborne and much more lightly regulated than drones. Mil-itary drones such as the Global Hawk can already act as telecomsrelays, so that part of the technology is proven; the challenge is toharness solar power to keep drones aloft for weeks or months, not

just a day or two. Large, lightweight UAVs can theoretically use so-lar power to remain in the air for weeks at a time; a prototypeZephyrdrone, built by Airbus, Europe’s aviation giant, stayed aloftfor14 days during a test flight in 2010.

High-altitude drones have also been proposed as a way to gen-erate electricity, because strong winds blow more reliably wellabove the ground. Known as wind drones or energy kites, suchdrones are tethered so that cables can deliver the electricity backto the ground. Makani, a startup acquired by Google in 2013, reck-ons a single energy kite can generate 50% more electricity than asingle wind turbine while using only 10% of the materials. EachMakani drone, which resembles a wing with eight propellers,weighs11 tonnes, compared with about100 tonnes for a compara-ble 600kW turbine. This approach is beingpursued by other firmstoo, including Ampyx Power and Kite Power Systems, bothbacked by E.ON, a German utility. Tethered drones on a smallerscale are also being considered for indoor use in warehouses,where they might help with stocktaking. Flying indoors neatlysidesteps many regulatory problems, and supplying power viatethers does away with the need for recharging. But GPS cannot beused for positioning.

At the lowest end of the spectrum are insect-like drones, just afew centimetres across, that could be used for surveillance insidebuildings, search and rescue, or even pollinating plants. Buildingvery small drones is hard because the technology used in largerdrones cannot simply be scaled down; different approaches are



2

1

MOVING bits around the internet is one thing; movingatoms around in the real world is something else en-tirely. In the two decades of the internet era, manyworld-changing technologies—web-publishing, file-sharing, online auctions, internet telephony, virtualcurrencies, ride-hailing—have raised new legal and

regulatory questions. In each case, regulators had to work out therules after the event: figuring out how libel law applies to the web,banning the sale ofNazi memorabilia, decidingwhetherBitcoin isa currency, determining whether Uber drivers are employees orcontractors, and so on. But drones are a different matter, becauseof the danger that flying robots pose to life and limb, and the exis-tence of strict rules that govern the use of physical airspace. Theirfuture will depend as much on decisions made by regulators as itdoes on technological advances. How will it play out?

Global policymakers are currently engaged in a “very interac-tive process of competition and co-operation”, says Greg McNeal,a law professor at Pepperdine University who advises the FederalAviation Administration (FAA) on drone regulation and is co-founder ofAirmap, a drone-software startup. Before the introduc-tion of America’s “part 107” rules last August, Google’s ProjectWing tested drones in Australia and Amazon in Canada, wherethe regulatory regimes were more accommodating. France’s rela-tively permissive regulation put it at the forefront of the agricultur-al use of drones. And in Britain a drone cluster has sprung uparound an airport in Aberporth, in Wales, where drone-friendlyregulations and facilities have been put in place. Now regulatorsin different countries are working closely together, attending each

other’s meetings and learning from eachother, while also competing to attractdrone startups. “It’s very good for the in-dustry, because every nation wants to be aleader,” says Mr McNeal.

The FAA’s part 107 rules, providing forcertification of commercial drone opera-tors, are generally seen as a model by othercountries. These rules, a decade in themaking, allow operators with a remote-pi-lot certificate (obtained by passing a testcosting $150) to fly a drone for commercialpurposes during the day, within line ofsight, in uncontrolled airspace, and with-out flying over people who are not in-volved in operating the drone. Other coun-tries have since followed America’s lead,and some are already going further: Franceand Switzerland allow some operation be-yond visual line of sight, says Mr McNeal,and from 2018 Japan will permit it for delivery drones. In Americathe next set of proposed rules from the FAA, expected later thisyear, will deal with flight over people and remote identification ofdrones. Next year there will be proposals for the control of multi-ple drones by a single operator, “extended visual line of sight” op-eration over longerdistances, and nightoperation. In 2019, saysMrMcNeal, the FAA will propose its first rules governing flights with-outa visual line ofsight, a crucial requirement fordelivery drones.

Drone companies can already go beyond part107 by obtainingspecial waivers from the FAA, provided they can show that theproposed operation can be conducted safely and meet some addi-tional requirements. This offers a way to test new regulations be-fore they are formalised. Such waivers impose additional safetyrequirements on drone operators: getting a waiver for night-timeoperation, for example, requires mounting a light on the dronethat is visible three miles away, and providing night-flight trainingfor operators. If all goes well, this could form the basis of a newrule, says Brendan Schulman, head ofpolicy at DJI.

Flying over people raises additional problems. The FAA’s pro-posed rule, due out later this year, is expected to ask drone opera-tors to show how they would mitigate the risk of injury to by-standers. The best way to do this, explains Mr Schulman, is tospecify an acceptable level of risk, and then require dronemakersto show that their vehicles meet that standard. This might involveadding cushioning or parachutes to drones, or ensuring that theycan still operate if some parts fail, or making them so small andlight that they would cause little injury if they fell on someone.

An idea from Australia also deserves to be more widely adopt-ed, he suggests: the creation of a special category for very smalldrones, allowing commercial operation without any certification.In Australia’s case this applies to drones weighing less than 2kg.Similar rules apply in Mexico and Canada, and are being consid-ered in India and several European countries. In America alldrones weighing less than 25kg are still treated the same. Butbroadly speaking, regulators are learning from a variety of ap-proaches being tried in different countries.

Traffic lights in the cloudsTo operate drones beyond visual line of sight and in large num-bers, particularly in densely populated areas, will take not just ex-tra rules but the establishment of new traffic-management sys-tems, akin to air-traffic-control systems, to preventdrones crashinginto each other or veering off course. Around 80% of consumerdrones, including those made by DJI�uneec and Intel, alreadysupport “geo-fencing”, using technology provided by MrMcNeal’s company, Airmap. Its database ofwhere drones are andare not allowed to fly is built into the software used to controlthem, working with satellite positioning to prevent an operator

Regulation

Rules and tools

Regulation and technology will have to evolve together toensure safety

Flying overpeopleraisesadditionalproblems

needed. In a paper published in February in the journal Chem,Japanese researchers explained how insect-sized drones coveredin hairs coated with a special gel picked up pollen from one plantand deposited it on another. They concluded that robotic pollina-torsmightoffera remedyfor the decline in honeybee populations.

Perhaps the most far-out proposal to date is to use drones tocarry human passengers in self-flying taxis. This is harder than us-ing drones for package delivery, because it raises safety concernsfor people in the air, not just on the ground. EHang, a Chinesedrone firm, hopes to test its one-person drone, which resembles agiant quadcopter with a passenger compartment, in Dubai in July.Other companies, including Airbus, Uber and Kitty Hawk, haveproposed similar “flying car” drones. Dario Floreano, a roboticsprofessor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (see Brainscan, previouspage), hasbeen thinkingaboutpassenger dronesaspart of the European Union’s “myCopter” project. Packages, hesays, can withstand sudden accelerations during flight that hu-mans cannot, which makes path-planning and obstacle avoid-ance more difficult. And the limited energy density of batteriesmay restrict the range ofpassenger drones to intra-city hops.

It is a big leap from today’s drones to these sorts of uses. Tryingto imagine how drones will evolve, and the uses to which theywill be put, is a bit like trying to forecast the evolution of comput-ing in the 1960s or mobile phones in the 1980s. Their potential asbusiness tools was clearat the time, but the technology developedin unexpected ways. The same will surely be true ofdrones. 7

from flying a drone too close to an airport, for example. Airmap’sdatabase can be updated in real time to keep drones away fromunexpected events such as fires and other incidents.

But once drones are flying beyond their operators’ line of sight,a more elaborate system will be needed to track large numbers ofthem and ensure they avoid each other and stay away frommanned aircraft, says Parimal Kopardekar of NASA’s Ames Re-search Centre. He is leading the development of a system calledUnmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management (UTM), an auto-mated traffic-management system for drones. Existing air-traffic-control systems are operated manually, with human controllersco-ordinating with human pilots during flight, but that will notwork for unmanned drones flying in much larger numbers. TheUTM system will be automatic, with drones filing requests to useparticular flight paths with a local data exchange, which then co-ordinates all the movements. “The regulator only sets the rulesand defines the exchanges, so it’s a very different way of doingthings from air-traffic control,” says Dr Kopardekar.

Last year NASA carried out a trial of its UTM architecture acrossthe United States which revealed several challenges, notes Dr Ko-pardekar. In particular, it turned out that fixed-wing and multi-rotor drones respond very differently when they encounter risingcolumns of air, called thermals. Fixed-wing drones “bouncearound quite a bit, by a few hundred feet”, says Dr Kopardekar,which meansdronescannotbe stacked too closely together. Routeplanning will, in short, require a detailed understanding ofmicro-climates and of the behaviours ofdifferent types ofdrones. Build-ing the necessary systems will take a few years.

Where are you going?The FAA plans to introduce the first rules around UTM from 2019.Drones will need to be equipped with “sense and avoid” systemsand long-range radio to communicate with each other and withthe data exchange. That also poses a challenge, says Jane RygaardofNokia, a makerofnetworkequipment, because existing mobilenetworks are designed to work with users on the ground, not inthe air. Networks will have to be augmented with antennae thatpoint towards the sky. This technologyalreadyexists to provide in-flight connectivity to aircraft, but will have to be extended more

widely to take in drones as well.And even once all these rules and tools

are in place, not everyone will respectthem. Some people may want to usedrones for nefarious purposes. A range ofanti-drone technologies is already beingtested. Police forces in some parts of theworld have trained birds of prey to attacksmall drones. Nets can also be used to trapthem, either fired from bazooka-likelaunchers or dropped by other drones.America’s Department of Defence holdsan annual event called BlackDart at whichvarious anti-drone technologies are evalu-ated. “The biggest surprise to military folkswas how difficult it was to combat smalldrones,” says Grant Jordan, the founder ofSkySafe, an anti-drone startup, whoworked on Black Dart a few years agowhen he was in the air force. When the tar-get is “tiny, very light and relatively slow”,the assumptions of traditional air defenceare all wrong, he says.

Big lasersystemsworked prettywell, herecalls, but are expensive and complex. Is-rael has used Patriot missiles to shootdown fixed-wing drones operated by Ha-mas, Mr Jordan says. By contrast, his firmdisables drones by intercepting their con-

trol signals and video feeds. Examining the radio traffic to andfrom a drone makes it possible to determine what type it is, track itand if necessary take it over to disable it or force it to land. Anti-drone systems made by SkySafe, and rivals such as Dedrone andDroneShield, are being evaluated for military and governmentuse and to police airspace around airports, stadiums and prisons(to prevent smuggling of phones, drugs and other items to in-mates). But it is unclear who has the legal authority to stop dronesthat pose a threat to public safety, says Mr Jordan. Existing air-safe-ty rules aim to protect passengers in aircraft; for drones, “the logicof these laws falls apart.”

It is clear that the complexities of operating drones in largenumbers have barely begun tobe understood. As the first wide-ly deployed mobile robots,drones already offer many excit-ing possibilities today, and nodoubt other, as yet un-dreamed-of uses will follow inthe future. Frank Wang, the foun-der of DJI, pictures people beingfollowed around by tiny perso-nal drones, like fairy sidekicks.Astro Teller of Google foreseesdeliverydrones that can come upwith any item on demand. Andpassenger drones might someday act as magic carpets, whisk-ingpeople acrosscities from roof-top to rooftop.

Drones make the extraordi-nary power of digital technol-ogies physically incarnate. Butbecause they operate in the phys-ical rather than the virtual world,exploiting the many opportuni-ties they offer will depend just asmuch on sensible regulation ason technological progress. 7



OFFER TO READERS

Reprints of Technology Quarterly are available from the Rights and Syndication Department. A minimum orderof five copies is required.

CORPORATE OFFER

Customisation options on corporate orders of 100 or moreare available. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.For more information on how toorder special reports, reprints or any queries you may have pleasecontact:

The Rights and Syndication DepartmentThe Economist20 Cabot SquareLondon E14 4QW

Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8148Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492e-mail: [email protected]/rights

In perfect formation

2

Taking flight - The Economist · 2020-04-03 · Taking flight 20170610_TQciviliandrones.indd 1...

Documents

Transcript of Taking flight - The Economist · 2020-04-03 · Taking flight 20170610_TQciviliandrones.indd 1...