We are rapidly moving into a future where unmanned aircraft systems — commercial drones — bring more productivity, greater safety, and a whole new perspective to a wide range of industries. Commercial drones are an important and unique spoke in the IoT wheel, providing more, better and new types of data to transform businesses. The key to transforming businesses is deploying this technology at scale in large enterprises and organizations. And the key to scale is autonomy. Aerial Innovation is working to advance that future in Silicon Valley and Japan.

The technologies, products and services that make commercial drones a transformative force are developing quickly. The industry is an ecosystem of vehicles and components and embedded control and optimization software, complemented by a broad array of payload possibilities. The off-vehicle ecosystem supports collecting and analyzing sensor data at scale and integrating it to improve business processes.

 Truly large-scale and transformative deployment of commercial UAS is being driven by advances in autonomy and a new infrastructure for safety, control, and management of tens of thousands of unmanned aircraft at a time. Autonomy is allowing operators to shift to a truly remote sensing and operating model. And UAS traffic management (UTM) systems are enabling UAS to fly safely in many more places and at higher densities. Of course, handling the data generated by these new end-points will require robust network capabilities and IoT platforms. And creating business improvements from that data will mean flexible analysis and visualization software.