As companies increasingly adopt and expand unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) technology to their systems, leaders are tasked with the daunting balancing act of staying abreast of new developments and changing regulatory requirements while simultaneously focusing on deliverables and investment returns.
Speaking on "what's new and what's next" for connected drones, James Pierce, supervisor of UAS Operations for Ameren, said many of his company's learnings revolve around existing infrastructure.
"We have a lot of plans to put up antennas on our existing towers, and we'll do some things on some existing infrastructure," he said, adding that "issues with towers" have become a concern.
"We own parts of towers, but we can't put things on them," he said in a session at the Energy Drone & Robotics Summit held recently in The Woodlands, Texas.
"Towers are old," Pierce continued. "If you want to add something to them, you end up dealing with restructuring. That means sometimes you have to rebuild the towers. And that's costly -- hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases."
Pierce said Ameren had to turn to other solutions besides using existing microwave towers, including installing antennas onto the company's transmission towers and structures.
Additionally, Pierce addressed UAS platforms themselves.
"They can do the flights of thousands of miles for 10 hours or 24 hours, but they're still not there longevity-wise," he said. "These pieces of equipment are high maintenance and they need a lot of tweaking."
Pros and cons of connectivity
Harry Nuttall, director of System Air for Southern Co., observed that "getting into a connected world where the drone is connected to a network that can be ultimately controlled autonomously," thereby removing the human element, is advantageous.
"But you need the economics to make drone [technology] competitive with the traditional methodology that it competes against," he said. "We've got to get to that conversation. If it takes a team of two or three people to deploy a drone to do the same work that a single person can do with a bucket truck, that is not competitive."
Nuttall touted the efficiency of helicopter utilization. "That's the reality: Helicopters are more competitive than a drone today," he said. "I don't want to pour water on the conversation, but that's just the truth."
Larry Barnard, UAS coordinator for Chevron, said he envisions unmanned traffic management evolving and maturing in the next three to five years.
"We can petition the FAA for some sort of protection against overflight," he said. "Connected drones, I believe, will be part of that."
Barnard said he also believes these technologies "may force agencies to consider a different way to do waivers: 'How much data can I get as soon as we spin up?' versus a paper-based system where you go into some website and request something and you talk to them six months later. We can do better than that, and we probably will."
Barnard anticipates drone connectivity going beyond individual aerial Internet of Things centers.
"I see us enabling a lot of global computing and fixed IoT sensor networks," he said. "I would love to be able to go back and share with folks that we can reduce thousands of hours of repeat duties in manual tasks and replace some of that with some very low-latency, viable, low-power, integrated sensors to do some of those checks. This would free folks up to do important work or continue training. But only part of that has to do with unmanned aerial vehicles."
