UAV: Large data revolution in the air

The big data is just e-commerce based precision marketing? This understanding is one-sided. Large data will be widely present in the physical world and the real economy, and the industrial revolution that it spawned is just beginning.

The latest case is unmanned aircraft, or unmanned aerial vehicles. It has a central flight control system, which can achieve the autonomous flight beyond visual range. After World War II, especially since the Gulf War, UAV technology has been a focus of military competition, but in the civil field, its application is very limited.

In the last year or two, this situation is changing, and there are some new and very interesting applications in the civilian field.

Agriculture, for example, can monitor the entire farm through regular drone patrols. In the past renting a plane to shoot, the cost is 1000 dollars/hour, and now a small UAV price less than 1000 dollars. When the farmer buys it, he can shoot the farm at any time and use the software to automatically analyze the images and data. By contrast, we can find problems that are difficult to find in human eyes. For example, whether the irrigation is homogeneous, the color of the soil changes, where there are pests and so on. According to these analyses, the farm can adjust the planting measures immediately and the harvest of the crops is improved.

The more important point is to conserve resources. For example, when a drone flies over the tree, it can determine whether the plant is short of water through the color spectrum of the leaves, then transmits the information to the watering system of the fruit forest, and some land is irrigated instead of blindly watering. Water resources can be saved-and this is the core of building precision agriculture with big data.

Industrial fields are also used. America's first Solar and SolarCity companies used drones to detect anomalies from millions of solar modules, while directing the construction of photovoltaic power plants to protect wildlife. Also such as power grid patrol, power transmission network stretches thousands of miles, the traditional power grid patrol, is the inspector through the Mountain ridge, along the patrol, arrived at a power High-voltage tower, still need to climb the tower, time-consuming not to say, the danger is also big. If the UAV is used, the efficiency can be multiplied. Encounter Lightning trip, such as sudden failure, the first time to arrive at the scene of unmanned function for the rapid recovery of power to fight for valuable time, unmanned aerial vehicles can also be around the goal of 360-degree omni-directional shooting, to achieve 0 dead ends.

In addition, the UAV's infrared shooting function can also detect the line fever and other potential failures, these advantages, even experienced power inspectors are difficult to reach. China's power system, there are millions of patrol inspectors, if the UAV can be popularized, will be a large area to replace the manual patrol, reduce costs.

In this regard, the UAV is a flying sensor, it extends the vision and perception of mankind to the air, so that the field of farmland, power grids, mines and other physical world to raise awareness to a new level.

This level of ascension in the technical field itself will set off a revolution. Traditional satellite remote sensing and manned aerial photography technology, not only costly, lack of flexibility, there is a key pain point: limited clarity, and the UAV collection of pictures, than satellite images to clear many times. Because drones can fly low below the clouds, flying at altitudes of up to 2 to 3 metres in height, predictably, this powerful, accurate data-gathering function will also overturn maps services such as Google in the future. The significance of unmanned aerial vehicles for large data can not be described by the revolution of large data in the sky.

Of course, the UAV technology is not fully mature, there are also some bottlenecks: Battery relay capacity, which directly affects the drone can fly how far, the ability to avoid collision, that is, in the increasing future of the aircraft, how to ensure that the aircraft between the interference, do not collide.

It is because of this challenge that UAVs are currently only enterprise-class applications that are difficult to extend to the consumer sector. Imagine a drone flying over a big farm, but if everyone uses a drone to deliver a courier, the sky will become very congested. Therefore, the use of unmanned aerial delivery, or a gimmick, even if the breakthrough technology bottlenecks, but also need the government to make corresponding regulations.

Recently, the United States government has begun to set the system for unmanned aircraft. There has been a heated debate in Congress about the official name of the drone. Drones in the United States are called "male bees" (drone). This is because the first operation of the military operations code-named "Male Bees", due to this successful operation, the UAV hence the name. But now, entrepreneurs are uniting against the name, which they think is reminiscent of military spying, intelligence-gathering, which is detrimental to the drone's promotion in the civilian sector. Members of Congress have advocated a formal change of name called "Drone", but the scientific community opposes it. They think that the drone's name is very stupid, as early as the car was invented, we saw no horse, the car can run, so the car called "no carriage", and finally proved that the term is not tenable. The American Science and technology advocates, in its technical nature, drones should be called "remote control aircraft", the name can withstand the test of history.

The debate in the United States Congress not only reflects the rapid popularity of drones in the civilian sphere, but also reflects the growing awareness of unmanned aircraft. If we can break through the technical bottlenecks mentioned above, the UAV is not only a flight sensor, but also a flying robot to perform more tasks. In the book "Top of the data", I assert that the advent of large data signals that human society is moving from an information society to an intelligent society. The new application of UAV in civil field will be a new footnote to this thesis.