Drone technology has burst onto the scene in the last decade, but we still haven’t maxed out its potential. Below, we explore three massive industries and see how far we can push drone tech to improve lives:
Retail
Drones in the retail world are starting to become more commonplace. In some countries, Amazon already uses drones to make deliveries, and this looks to be where the future is heading. Can we push this technology even further than this? Maybe there’ll be a time where you can use a drone to bring clothing items to your door, letting you try them on. If you have to send any back that doesn’t fit, the drone stays until you’ve finished, then you send them back right away. It improves convenience and can cut down on the amount of packaging waste created and used by people returning items to shops.
Agriculture
Agricultural drones are often used take show images from above of fields and land. It lets farmers see the health of their crops, but we could also start using them to track any rogue animals. If farmers but chips or something on livestock, they can use a drone to track them if they run too far afield. Additionally, drone technology has already started helping the agricultural industry by attaching water buckets to the drones and using them to water fields. Stuff like this has so much potential – you can do the same sort of thing, only with buckets of seeds to help sew a field a lot faster. Potentially, you could use drones as security cameras at night as well, stopping thieves from entering fields and stealing livestock or produce.
Construction
Drone use in the construction sector is pretty diverse. Again, they are often used to create aerial images of a construction site, plotting where things will go and showing progress. However, what other uses could there be for drones within this industry? One idea is to use them to make deliveries around a site. Right now, a drone is probably only capable of carrying lunch to someone really high up on a site with crane hire and people working at heights. Already, this does improve convenience, but drones could also be used to take tools and materials around sites. Who knows, we may have industrial drones in the future that are strong enough to work together to carry large building materials to different sites, eliminating the need for big petrol-fuelled lorries to pollute the highways. Perhaps this is a step too far, but we might even see drones that are capable of doing some construction themselves, even if it is as simple as placing bricks in a wall.
The most interesting thing about drone technology is that we just don’t know how far it can be pushed. We genuinely have no clue how strong drones could be made in the future, or what they can be programmed to do. So, it’s thrilling to hypothesize and come up with ideas about how technology will change and play big roles in massive industries.
