Is it time for a reality check when it comes to drones and service? Mark Glover speaks to Robert Garbett from the UK Drone Delivery Group who says mid-mile delivery might be possible but we're a long way from Amazon delivering from above.

Think drones and you probably think of small, multi-rotor objects, when in fact according to the International Organisational Standardization’s (ISO) definition, it’s actually, “Any unmanned system that is autonomously or remotely controlled.”

So this could include: any ground vehicle, any air vehicle, any boat, any ship, any surface sub-sea system, any space system; in fact any hybridization of the above which is remotely controlled or does not have a pilot sitting on board is technically a drone.

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“The image you’ve got in your mind is so wrong. It’s definitely not just a small, flying thing,” says Robert Garbett, the author of that ISO definition and a drone industry expert who’s explaining to me how the technology goes far beyond what we see buzzing in the air. “Once you re-approach the whole topic from that perspective, it opens it out into a far more expansive, exciting and beneficial product. A tiny, remotely controlled spider-shaped air drone really can’t do very much on it’s own but as part of an integrated system with autonomous control, it becomes much more powerful.”

However, drones were airbound in the early 90s, used extensively and effectively for the first time in the Gulf War. In the Spring of 1991, an article appeared in Airpower Journal, penned by Captain P.Tice of the US Air Force. His piece, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: The Force Multiplier of the 1990s, centered around the dwindling number of army personnel and how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) - or drones – could effectively plug the gap.

In the piece Captain Tice said: “When used, UAVs should generally perform missions charecterised by the three Ds: dull, dirty and dangerous.” Now, this was written in the context of military operations: long-term endurance missions that could last several days (dull); the detection of chemical agents (dirty); and reconnaissance behind enemy lines (dangerous), so their use in this instance is very different to delivering an Amazon package, or the delivery of a spare part, but ultimately its purpose is to remove the human from a process.

One could argue service is going in the same direction. The human influence is becoming less as self-diagnosing assets, remote technology and big data gradually impede on an engineer’s role. Will drone assistance be part of their eventual demise?

There’s still some way to go before we see autonomous robots donning overalls and popping round to fix your boiler, but in other sectors such as the airport industry, the influence of drones is already being felt and, according to Garbett, has further potential.

“The service sector in the airport system is huge and a lot of it can be done via autonomous systems or remotely controlled systems: Baggage handling for example,” he says. “The technology could eliminate the need for human beings to be airside increasing security and the efficiency of baggage handling. It could also eliminate the health and safety risks associated with human beings throwing bags around all day.”

"In 1865 a spluttering, noisy vehicle with four wheels was an alien…as…well…a drone in 2020..." 

Garbett is Chief Executive of Drone Major Group, a specialist consultancy advising on the application of drone technology working with customers who want an independent and expert guidance on what is possible, where to procure what they need and how to implement it safely and effectively. In 2018, he founded the UK Drone Delivery Group where over 300 members seek to lobby the UK Government in establishing a clear path to a UK-wide commercial drone industry.

Last month the group published a white paper (currently out for consultation) calling for the creation of long term drone testing areas, a significant step that could speed up the process of acceptance. He does however acknowledge the process is a long one, an evolution almost, referencing regulation in the automotive industry as a blueprint. “Right from the start, you could do what you wanted [when driving] because there were no regulations. Then the regulations started to come in, the first one meant you had to get out of your car at a junction, wave a red flag as you crossed just in case you killed a horse…” He pauses for a moment, “I believe that happened because one horse was killed which is a great example of over regulation.”

I laughed at this. It sounded ridiculous but online investigation revealed 1865 Locomotive Act enforcing a top speed of two miles per hour when passing through towns. The regulation was passed to protect horse and cart, the primary form of travel at the time, where motorists, according to the legislation were expected to “carry a red flag constantly displayed, and shall warn riders and drivers of horses of the approach of locomotives, and shall signal the driver thereof when it shall be necessary to stop, and shall assist horses, and carriages drawn by horses, passing the same”.

It seems ridiculous now, but Garbett’s comparison is a salient one. In 1865 a spluttering, noisy vehicle with four wheels was an alien…as…well…a drone in 2020. In both contexts however, concerns are fueled around safety, taking well over 100 years of further regulation and development before driving became even remotely safe, or less dangerous.

Yet as recently as the 1970s deaths at the wheel were still remarkably high, it took another layer of robust regulation, primarily around seatbelt use to make a dent in the grim statistics. In terms of an evolution, 100 years is more than enough time for change to happen.

Is this the approach then for drone commercial use in the UK? In the group’s white paper the scattering of drone testing areas are cited as ‘sandboxes’, although Garbett prefers Technical Evolution Areas static areas that, he says aren’t really there to  purely  test. “They’re there to take a thing from concept to operational deployment and beyond,” he explains, “and through that learning curve, and to accelerate that learning curve upwards so we really can get the benefit that we currently get from cars. So you link the technology areas and link them across the country and start in safe areas first.”

"We are going to turn this into a technology evolution. Somewhere in the UK where we are starting to deliver parcels, mid-mile, depot to sub-depot.”

The press release accompanying the white paper cited a Barclays’ report valuing the drone market close to $40 billion by 2023 so perhaps its evolution will be quicker if these figures transpire, although the driver lies not in B2C delivery (the idea that Amazon Drones will be dropping parcels from the sky is, according to Garbett feasible but a long way away, “There’s no way you’re going to have sufficient infrastructure and the depth of availability of airspace and the durability of batteries to have a small air drone delivering things to my balcony.”) but in terms of service and logistics, value lies not in last mile delivery but the mid-mile to depots, where the final leg of the journey to the warehouse or factory could take be fulfilled by an autonomous vehicle that trundles into the building carrying the spare part.

Garbett’s knowledge in this area is refreshing and it’s good to hear clarity on a topic that’s been shrouded in mystery, perhaps skewed by Amazon’s glimpse into their own drone programme, and perceived – wrongly – as that “small, tiny flying object”. But what about a watertight use-case for the technology’s commercially? How far away are we from that?

Garbett eludes to a project he’s working on around mid-mile in delivery and logistics. Run in tandem with a company he’s unable to mention the study has entered – encouragingly - into the feasibility stage. “We are going to turn this into a technology evolution,” he enthuses, “somewhere in the UK where we are starting to deliver parcels, mid-mile, depot to sub-depot – live and commercially.”

And the next step? I ask? What we need are companies like your audience to come forward and get involved.  The benefits are there, the technology is there and the will from Government to make this happen is also now there...what we need now is forward thinking companies or trail blazers to come forward so that we can assist them to realise the future.

Over to you then reader and remember, please try to keep that ISO definition in mind. There’s more here than a buzzing spider thing.

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Further Reading: 

• Read more about drones in field service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/drones
• Read more about the latest use of technology in field service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/technology
• Follow Robert Garnett on LinkedIn here.

A whitepaper from the UK Drone Delivery group says implementing testing grounds for the technology could accelerate a potentially successful UK drone industry.

The UK Drone Delivery Group says a mass-participation commercial drone testing programme would be a significant step in bringing the drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to the country's skies.

In a recently published white paper the group, made up of 300 senior leaders, calls for the development of new testing grounds which it says will contribute to the UK becoming a world leader in the drone industry.

Service delivery

The publication of the white paper comes as the use of UAVs for commercial purposes such as parcel and service deliveries continues to be plagued with issues around legislation and regulation.

Currently UAVs operating Beyond Visual Line of Site (BVLOS) require permission from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to operate. There is also ambiguity on Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) and the development of an Unmanned Air Traffic Management System (UTM) - Air Traffic Control for drones - continues.

The group formed in 2018 by drone industry expert Robert Garbett is ultimately seeking to agree on a solution that covers all BVLOS, VTOL and (UTM) issues and to eventually lobby government in establishing a clear path to a UK-wide commercial drone industry.

Garbett says implementing the could bring substantial benefits to the country but indicated the need for testing areas needed to happen swiftly. "Facilitating a world leading UK commercial drone industry will bring immense benefits to UK plc, driving innovation, wealth creation and employment opportunities right across the economy," he said.

"...we need to act now. We are keen to identify new testing grounds to be used for take-off and landing, ideally including airports and airfields, but also forests, remote coastal areas and ports through to residential areas and other dense urban environments."

The whitepaper will now undergo a period of consultation followed by a review with full completion expected by the end of June. A draft of the white paper can be found here, which includes a facility for comments. Feedback is required by the 31 May.

In service, the use of drones has been discussed as a way to assist in final-mile delivery particularly in traffic-dense urban areas. Amazon have been hinting at a drone delivery service since 2013. Amazon Prime Air was showcased at last year's re:MARS conference but it remains grounded due to aviation regulations.

Companies create innovative solutions to complex problems for enterprise users.

 

Parrot, the drone group, announced it is partnering with RIIS, a leading provider of mobile app, web development and IT consulting services, to develop custom applications of artificial intelligence for Parrot’s popular ANAFI drone platform. Parrot and RIIS are focused on exploring the use of artificial Intelligence and computer vision technology, combined with drone data capture, to solve countless industry challenges using an efficient and cost-effective approach. 

 

To help demonstrate the promise of this technology and allow developers to start creating innovative apps, Parrot and RIIS have released a technical whitepaper, which provides step-by-step instruction to add AI and computer vision to the ANAFI Drone using Parrot’s open source Ground SDK.

 

"We are excited to explore the immense capabilities AI and drones will deliver to our clients through our ongoing partnership with RIIS,” said Jerome Bouvard, Parrot Director of Strategic Partnership. “At Parrot, we are always looking for innovative solutions to solve for our enterprise partner’s every-day pain points.”

 

Parrot and RIIS are actively exploring use cases which could include municipal use of drones for assessing parking lots, public parks, and streetlights; crowd monitoring; warehouse inventory counting; automated inspection of cell phone towers and solar panels; property surveillance for real estate professionals and developers, and much more. This technology is expected to significantly enhance the often-tedious processes required to complete professional projects across a variety of industries and sectors.

 

“Our recent collaboration with Parrot perfectly illustrates the immense potential of developing apps for Parrot’s ANAFI drone platform,” said RIIS CEO and Founder Godfrey Nolan. “Leveraging the power of AI and machine learning apps with Parrot drones promises to provide previously impossible solutions to costly and time-consuming challenges.

 

Through its SDK Partner program, Parrot is working to create a global ecosystem of drone apps to serve the unique and ever-evolving needs of its enterprise and professional users. Through this program, Parrot is working with partners, like RIIS, to create and bring to market new applications, software and hardware that seamlessly integrates with Parrot ANAFI and ANAFI Thermal drones.

 

UK Drone Delivery Group makes urgent ‘call to action’ for property owners and influencers to provide testing areas for drones - to prevent ‘bottleneck to growth’...

One of the UK’s leading drone experts today urged British property owners and business leaders to leverage the opportunity of their under-used land for drone testing, to help accelerate the rate of growth of the UK drone industry, in the face of what he described as ‘an emerging ‘bottleneck’ to growth’.

Robert Garbett founder of the UK Drone Delivery Group, which is the first industry initiative to provide guidance on the steps required to enable accelerated commercialisation of the UK Drone Industry, stated “There is a current unnecessary ‘bottleneck’ in the evolution of the drone industry and this primarily lies in the lack of controlled testing locations which can provide trial areas and safe environments to accelerate the development of drone technology, help to shape its standards, and ensure appropriate but non constricting regulations”.

He commented “The British Government has played a constructive role to date and the UK is a world leader in drone technology… but to stay ahead in this fast moving game, then business, local authorities, police, fire & rescue services and even members of the public, must work together in a partnership of participation and cooperation.

Examples of desirable drone technology testing locations include not only large airports and aerodromes that may already be approved by the Civil Aviation Authority, but also forests, remote coastal areas and ports, through to residential areas and other dense urban environments.  Testing will need to include everything from simple potential drone tasks such as parcel delivery, to much more complex applications such as smart motorway monitoring, law enforcement rapid response and search and rescue.”

The economic benefits offered by drone technology are estimated to be massive, with significant growth expected to accelerate across surface, underwater, air and space, as well as emerging hybrid drone applications.   In November 2019, analysts at Barclays predicted that the commercial drone market could grow tenfold from $4bn in 2018 to $40bn in five years, resulting in efficiency cost savings of some $100bn… and these predictions relate to solely air drones. If you add on the fast-growing possibilities for surface, underwater or space drones then the potential growth is substantially greater.

“However,” says Robert Garbett “these predictions of the astonishing potential for growth, are dependent upon the business community and wider public recognising the important part they can play regarding potential testing locations and trial areas.

“The opportunity for the commercial drone market is vast, but with such a fast-growing emerging technology we have to ensure we act quickly, lest our ambitious international competitors overtake our lead.

“My ‘call to action’ is to say that I’d like to hear from those who feel they can contribute to this aspect of this exciting fast growth industry, which is expected to be of vital future importance to UK plc.”

Robert Garbett’s ‘call to action’ and expansion of Drone testing in the UK comes a few days before the House of Lords debates a Government bill on Monday 10 February to update the licensing regime for airspace use, together with greater police enforcement power to ensure safe and responsible use for drones.

Those interested in participating in the UK Drone Delivery Group’s initiative to provide testing areas for drones should contact: https://www.dronemajorgroup.com/drone-delivery-group

World’s first ISO approved drone standards have been announced, possibly impacting final mile services.

A few years back Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos declared on US National TV that he would be investing in Prime Air a delivery network that would utilise drones to deliver packages to their customers. At the time many cynically argued that it was a fanciful notion designed to gain Amazon 16 minutes of prime-time coverage and nothing more. But is the idea really so far-fetched? Could delivery drones prove to be an answer to traffic congestion when delivering spare parts in urban areas?

Mark Glover takes a look to see what’s on the horizon.

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News and Kieran Notter, Director, Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax from GE Digital explore the findings of an exclusive independent research conducted by Field Service News and sponsored by ServiceMax from GE Digital.

In this excerpt from the full one-hour long webcast, Oldland and Notter discuss both the challenges and opportunities of an ageing workforce within the field service sector and assess whether there is any substance to fears that we are facing an ageing workforce crisis.

 

Want to know more? The full webcast PLUS an exclusive report based on the findings of this research is available for Field Service News subscribers.

If you are a field service practitioner you may qualify for a complimentary 'industry practitioner' subscription. Click here to apply now!

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What will the impact of servitization and the move to preventative maintenance that it entails have on parts and inventory management? Erik Kjellstrom, Pre-Sales Manager, Syncron tackled this question at the Aftermarket Conference in Hamburg last October. Kris Oldland followed up with him after the event to find out more more...

As Erik Kjellstrom, Pre-Sales Manager, Syncron, stepped down from the stage having just given a presentation at this year’s Aftermarket Conference, I was looking forward to the opportunity to catch up with him for a number of reasons.

His organisation has been something of an anomaly in our sector of recent years. A pioneering lone voice that often were seemingly single-handedly trying to bring a dedicated solution to what was often the unloved piece of the field service puzzle – parts management.

Whether, it be pricing, inventory management or stock ordering, Syncron have successfully over the last few years been one of few brands to be associated with taking this part of the aftermarket conversation seriously. We’ve seen Syncron a lot at various conferences over the last 24 months and almost each time they’ve been armed with case studies and hard data that revealed just how much (and how easily) their solution has improved their clients P&L both in terms of top line revenue and bottom line profit.

However, this time around there was a twist to their approach. Having recently brought a new in module into their offering that is focused on predictive maintenance and based on IoT, were they shifting their focus - or was this development just a natural evolution that reflected the changing dynamics of the industry?

The central thrust of Kjellstrom’s presentation was that essentially there are a number of interesting trends appearing in the aftermarket industry – covering a lot of the ground that regular readers of Field Service News will be familiar with.

We are seeing futuristic concepts such as Drones, 3D Printing, Augmented Reality and Autonomous Vehicles all of which have all been on the horizon offering the promise of industry revolution for a while but are now really starting to come into the mainstream conversationTo begin with, coming from the technology perspective we are seeing futuristic concepts such as Drones, 3D Printing, Augmented Reality and Autonomous Vehicles all of which have all been on the horizon offering the promise of industry revolution for a while but are now really starting to come into the mainstream conversation. Alongside this with have already seen wide adoption of Mobile, Cloud and increasingly the Internet of Things amongst manufacturers and service providers.

However, the changes we are seeing in our sector are not just driven by technology alone.

Sweeping demographic change within the workforce, accelerated by the ageing workforce crisis being faced by companies across the globe and being exacerbated by the unprecedented differences between the incoming Millennial generation and the outgoing Baby Boomers, is of course another factor driving industry evolution forwards.

Finally, add into this mix our shift to a much more service and outcome orientated society as a whole - arguably itself the result of the generational shift alongside the technical advances referenced above and we are seeing companies turn their entire business models on their head.

Servitization has gone from fringe concept to buzzword across the last eighteen months or so as talk of ever decreasing SLAs and increasing First-Time-Fix rates has morphed into discussions around guarantees of uptime and the financial impact of unplanned downtime.

As such our industry is in a fascinating and exciting state of flux at the moment and it was this rapid development and the various drivers behind it that were at the heart of the Kjellstrom presentation in Hamburg.

Of course, such dynamic changes within the sector need to be reflected within the solutions provided and it is the shift towards preventative maintenance (itself a major stepping stone on the way to servitization) that Syncron have focused their latest efforts on.

“We have been working very much to support more reactive service models in the past in terms of inventory management and pricing but what we are now doing, both from a product stand point but also from a service offering standpoint, is we are working towards an uptime supporting module.” Kjellstrom explained when we caught up.

In brief, Syncron are integrating a new module into their current service network optimisation capabilities.

These capabilities in the past had all been centred on the parts management area of the Aftermarket sector – pricing, inventory management, and ordering. However, their new module is a predictive maintenance module they call Uptime (makes sense), which Kjellstrom explains is intended to ‘blend together the aspect of inventory management and pricing etc with an understanding of the actual assets that use these parts.

It seems a natural alignment to bring the asset and the parts management together in the preventative management worldIt seems a natural alignment to bring the asset and the parts management together in the preventative management world. Indeed, much of reasoning behind this development from Syncron echoes a similar line of conversation that ServiceMax put forward when they announced their integration with GE Digital’s technology Asset Performance Management (APM).

Essentially both Syncron and ServiceMax are approaching the same central maxim - just from two different angles. In a world of IoT and sensor-led preventative maintenance the asset is King and everything else should fall in line around and work back from that one premise.

However, where one does feel that viewpoints will change between the two organisations is in how the ecosystem is built. Through their recent acquisition list including Servicemax, it is clear that GE Digital have their eyes set on building a comprehensive and all encompassing new platform for age of the Industrial Internet.

For Syncron however, the focus for the time being at least, appears to be in line with their best-of-breed heritage.

“I think that a product such as ours and a Field Service Management (FSM) system are complimentary products.” Kjellstrom explains.

“We have many instances where we will see a FSM system or a maintenance system that runs in compliment to the more Aftermarket focussed, parts oriented solutions such as ours. Perhaps what makes Syncron a little bit unique is the way we work and how we blend together the aspects of network optimisation and parts optimisation which is often natively something that belongs in a FSM tool.”

With so many technologies evolving at once a clear case could be made for establishing a comprehensive technology ecosystem across a service orientated business and Syncron is set to be an important part of that ecosystem.

Yet, in a world that seems to be in constant Beta, not all developments are equal and Kjellstrom believes it is important to understand how different technologies can impact the way we work when building out your own tech strategy.

Certain technologies will bring refinement whilst others offer revolution.

“We definitely see more potential impact from some types of the technologies than others,” he comments.

“What we are really interested in are the questions like will 3D printing totally replace a need for service part inventory management – and the answer is no it will not, it may enhance it but it will not replace it.”

Does the development of autonomous vehicles mean that we will begin to see car sharing across a team of engineers“How about autonomous vehicles? Does the development of autonomous vehicles mean that we will begin to see car sharing across a team of engineers” he asks rhetorically before outlining that such technology could lead to servitizing the fleet at which point automotive manufacturers concerns about spare parts really begin to truly change and evolve into an entirely new set of thinking and processes.

“These are the types of questions that we are interested in, in terms of the emerging technology.” He explains.

“What we are seeing is that some of these new technologies are really pushing towards a more uptime related world, whereas some technologies are more likely to become tools for us to simply improve existing processes.”

However, whilst he believes the shift to Servitization and outcome based solutions will continue to grow, Kjellstrom also insists that the traditional break-fix market and the aspects of pricing, parts management and inventory which that function drives forward, will never fully disappear.

“I am sure that the shift in focuses to uptime guarantees are growing rapidly and eventually break-fix is going to become less significant but there is always going to be the type of customers where uptime critical assets are not relevant.”

Indeed, whilst we wait for the weighting between the old and the new to do a 180 flip, one thing is clear, for the short-term at least we need to be able to accommodate both – which means looking to the future today – something Kjellstrom and his colleagues have embraced which is clearly evident by their introduction of the new Uptime module.

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SkyX, a Canadian company specialising in long-range unmanned aerial monitoring, have recently announce the successful delivery and installation of its first production xStation, a unit that remotely recharges SkyX drones during missions – a key milestone in the company’s evolution.

For field service organisations, particularly those operating in sectors such as oil and gas or power generation, considering using drones to monitor their assets and infrastructure in the field this could be a significant development that could potentially increase efficiency of such operations dramatically.

The xStation is a rugged, all-metal piece of engineering designed to allow the SkyOne drone to remotely recharge while monitoring long-range infrastructure, then continue its mission. By installing multiple xStations along a route, SkyOne can monitor assets like oil and gas pipelines or railroad tracks that stretch hundreds – even thousands – of kilometres.

SkyX is the only operational Unmanned Aerial Systems company to combine a fixed-wing VTOL aircraft with remote charging stations, giving it a distinct competitive advantage.

“I’m thrilled to see this successful milestone in the SkyX journey,” says company CEO and founder Didi Horn. “I’m particularly proud because this unit was invented by our team. From conception to testing to patenting – this is a proprietary SkyX product. It is extremely exciting to see our product coming together as a full service to enhance the efficiency and safety of the oil and gas industry."

 

For clients, xStations are installed along the route. When algorithms tell SkyOne it’s getting close to recharge time, the aircraft autonomously seeks out the next xStation instead of having to return to home base. The clamshell-like station roof opens automatically; SkyOne then transitions to vertical mode and descends like a helicopter onto the xStation landing pad. The roof closes, providing safe harbour while SkyOne recharges and performs a complete systems check before continuing on its mission.

The complex proprietary engineering behind the xStation was developed completely in-house. SkyX proved the concept with a scaled-down xStation in August of 2016, and has since pushed ahead to ensure the production xStation is as efficient and robust as possible, built for demanding conditions in a wide range of climates.

For the production models, SkyX has partnered with leading-edge Canadian automated solutions firm CMP  and the first xStations are scheduled to be installed for clients in July of 2017.

 

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