Top 5 Recent Drone Breakthroughs: 2013 - 2015Top 5 Recent Drone Breakthroughs: 2013 - 2015 1. Drones go into mainstream business in Construction, Oil/Gas and Agriculture. Over the past few years, drones have moved from the "government phase" to the "consumer phase" into the "commercial phase." In the consumer phase, the drone was more toy than tool. The video capabilities and simple flight interfaces made them fun and accessible. But more recently, these toys have been rapidly turning into tools, and we're thinking of them now as "sensors in the sky." "It's almost like we forget about the drone. Now, we are just connecting a sensor to the cloud and that sensor's in the air. It's below the satellites and above street view." These sensor platforms ("drones") are now being used in real estate, precision agriculture, oil and gas, construction, and many other domains. 2. Cloud-connected consumer drones run distributed computation, running apps on drone, phone and cloud simultaneously. "With today's drones you get connectivity, you get the cloud, and if you architect your system correctly, the drone is just an extension of the Internet." When you distribute the computational task between these three things (the drone, the cloud, and the Internet), you get a very powerful platform that can do an extraordinary number of things, intelligently and at scale think of it as extending the App Store into the physical world and the sky. 3. Powerful onboard Linux processors appear on sub-$1,000 drones. "Drones are very powerful computing platforms," says Anderson. "They now have built-in, Linux-based, computer vision technology. They look like toys (and you can use them as toys), but they're really flying AI platforms, and this is just the beginning." "Right now we're doing 1 gigahertz but with these converging technologies, we're going to be moving to multicore, multi-gigahertz GPUs, DSPs, the works and they're going to be selling for less than a thousand bucks." 4. Industry consortiums (e.g. Dronecode) emerge to build open software stack, drone policy leadership not driven by military. Over the past few years, nonmilitary consortiums have emerged to push drone technology and collaboration forward. This particular movement is unique and impressive not only because so many people are collaborating/sharing, but also because it is so interdisciplinary. Anderson expands, "We have the computer side; we have the computer vision side; we have the AI side; we have the cloud side; we have the applications side. No one company or industry knows all the potential applications." 5. Prices for autonomous GPS-guided drones fall 50% (US $500), go mass-market retail. Drones are demonetizing rapidly. Ten years ago, drones were million-dollar military/industrial things. Today they are on the shelves of Walmart. But it didn't stop there... Anderson explains further, "They started at $1,500 and now they're at $500 and they're soon going to $50, with even better technology onboard. The price decline in the industry is staggering."