Top 6 Anticipated Drone Breakthroughs 2016 - 2018Top 6 Anticipated Drone Breakthroughs 2016 - 2018 As entrepreneurs and investors, these are the areas you should be focusing on, as the business opportunities are tremendous. 1. Drones are increasingly based on cutting-edge smartphone technology (Qualcomm Snapdragon platform). The drone industry is leveraging billions of dollars of investment going into this kind of revolution in our pockets. We are using commodity hardware and open-source software to outperform military systems faster and cheaper. "This is just the beginning," says Anderson. "You will basically see supercomputer performance in toy level devices, just as we're already seeing with smartphones." 2. Computer vision, sense-and-avoid and optical tracking become standard in consumer drones. The next big breakthrough in drone research will be "sense-and-avoid." Right now, drones are either manually piloted or GPS piloted, but as we integrate them into our urban fabric, they'll need true autonomy. Anderson expands, "Drones will need to have eyes. Sensors like radar, LiDAR, stereo vision, sonar, and they'll need to use this to autonomously avoid obstacles and fly. It's environmental awareness and it is necessary to safely navigate worlds they've never explored." "Eventually, the data from autonomous drones will convince the regulators that they're safer than having a pilot." 3. Major software companies integrate drone data into core offerings, taking "reality capture" mainstream. "It's really hard to digitize the physical world," says Anderson. "Satellites are too high, and two-thirds of the planet's covered by clouds at any given point in time. Street View is limited to the street. The way we're going to digitize the planet is by putting sensors out there on drones, with anywhere/anytime access to the sky." Once we do that, we'll create the biggest big data opportunity we've ever seen. Autodesk, Salesforce, SAP, Google, etc. want to take that data and turn it into analytics to track all kinds of things, like how things change. 4. Drones surpass satellites in amount of data gathered and used. A transition is happening -- Earth observation started in the space age with satellites. Anderson continues, "I believe we're going to see drones become the main way that we digitize the planet from the air. Satellites are going to be complimentary, covering big areas but at lower resolution." 5. Drones become like Wi-Fi. "Today the FCC doesn't have to regulate or give you a license for Wi-Fi because it's low power and self-de-conflicting it's not a threat to anyone," says Anderson. "In the future, as drones become small enough, with low kinetic energy, and smart enough, I believe the FAA will regulate them like Wi-Fi. We want the FAA to create kind of an 'open spectrum' sandbox to allow for a huge amounts of innovation."