Drones!

Now that drones are being used more, either experimentally or more generally, in delivery services and other applications we thought this item might be of interest to our visitors.

IDTechEx’s recent market research report on Drones and their associated technologies predicts the drone market to be over $22Bn (€19bn) by 2041. The report “Drone Market and Industries 2021-2041” covers the key areas of the drone environment, such as the hardware, software and sensors which are critical to drone use cases and adoption. This article discusses the key areas of the drone market and drone design.

What are the main use cases for drones in 2030, 2040?
Who are the major players in the drone market?
What are the key drivers for market growth?
What is the projected revenue for the drones market from 2020 onwards?
What is the drone market segmentation?
What is the drone segmentation between consumer and commercial drones?

Drones have, once again, opened up the possibility of experimenting with the aerodynamic design of flying objects. The aircraft industry itself spent decades experimenting with the design of aircraft, both in civilian and military applications. Indeed, numerous technologies failed and some succeeded before the outlines of the general dominant designs emerged.

Drones have also represented an opportunity for novel designs: they are light-weight, battery-powered, and electrically-propelled. All these components can be arranged in many new novel ways, which in the past few years led to an explosion of designs. This report provides you with the insight and understanding to make insightful decisions about this key market area.

Different drones have different applications. Rotary drones are typically more efficient designs for smaller drone sizes. This is due to their design. With four fixed-pitch props, there are few moving parts and this reduces the cost of the drone. However, this design does not scale up very well.

Quadcopters require a stabilization for each of their motors in order to fly. In order for the drone to stay stable in the air, it needs to individually adjust the thrust in each of its props. As a quadcopter requires its motors to speed up or slow down to adjust the thrust, there needs to be a built-in time delay to how fast the drone can react, as it takes time to change the speed of the prop due to its inertia. So scaling the drone up to a larger size does not work, because the larger the propeller, the more energy it takes to change its speed. This either needs a drastic oversize of each motor, which would increase the weight, or have a slow dynamic response, which would impact handling.

As a result of this, fixed wing drones are typically used for longer distances, where less dynamic handling is required. Use cases include surveying or mapping, where the drone can follow a fixed path and map a large area whilst remaining in the VLOS of the drone pilot.

With different designs of drones, different use cases are more suited to them. The report provides  insight into the different applications for drone technologies. The use cases of agricultural, search and rescue, mapping and localization, delivery, and consumer drones are considered and analyzed with forecasts for both 2021-2031 and 2031-2041. It provides an understanding in each of these use case areas and their market predictions for the next two decades. 

One key area of importance is regulations for different use cases. For example, there are restrictions over where the drone can fly. It cannot fly in built-up areas, around airports (up to 5km) away, and similar urban situations. This limits applications such as drone delivery, as the drones will only be able to deliver to rural locations. Furthermore, privacy restrictions do not permit recordings over private property in some countries. This limits the use cases in delivery or infrastructure management for a domestic setting. The report covers the different country restrictions for drones, and summarizes the impact of these on the drone market in the future.

Drones sales revenue. Source: IDTechEx

@IDTechEx 

Expanded PXI line for Munich

Expanded PXI digital product line with two new high performance digital instruments which will be shown at Electronica.

Geotest has recently expanded its digital test product line with the introduction of the GX5295 and GX5960 PXI digital instruments.

The GX5295 offers the highest performance and most features of any 3U PXI dynamic digital I/O board on the market and provides a cost-effective solution for semiconductor test applications. The GX5295 features a per-channel PMU and high-performance pin electronics supporting a
programmable drive / sense voltage range from -2 V to +7 V - providing both analog and digital test capabilities in a single module. Each card offers 32 bi-directional, 100 MHz digital channels with up to 256 digital channels being supported in one timing domain.

Geotest's GX5960 50 MHz digital subsystem represents a new level of capabilities and performance for PXI digital instrumentation. Based on the EADS T964 VXI module and offering equivalent functionality as well as additional capabilities, the GX5960 features programmable high-voltage pin electronics (-10 V to +15 V) and a high-performance timing generator/sequencer with 256 time sets and 1ns per pin timing resolution.

The compact 6U PXI form factor offers a cost effective, compact form factor without sacrificing performance for system, board and component test applications. In addition, the GX5960 offers a per-channel parametric measurement unit (PMU) and analog bus access for each I/O channel -
providing hybrid channel (digital or analog) measurement capabilities. Two module configurations are available - the 32 channel GX5964 or the 16 channel GX5961 which offers guided probe support and static high voltage I/O.

Both the GX5295 and GX5960 are supplied with the DIOEasy software package, which provides vector editing / display & file import utilities, a virtual instrument panel, and 32-bit DLL driver libraries.

The GX5295 is available October 15th and the GX5960 digital subsystem is available November 1 and will be presented for the first time in Europe at electronica 2010 (Munich DE 9/12 Nov 2010).