Think like a bird. Think in three dimensions. Think of what it means to sense, connect, share, and act up and out as much as forward and back and side to side.
Amazon.com recently made news by showing a prototype drone, designed to deliver your packages. The idea of thousands of small flying vehicles filling the skies every time a new Stephen King book came out drew praise and mockery. Personally, I suspect that particular idea isn’t practical (except, perhaps, for remote users). The material goods that Amazon sells come from ground-based suppliers and go to ground-based customers. While, in bulk, there may be advantages to lifting these products into the air, it’s hard to see how you would work through the laws, logistics, energy costs, noise pollution, environmental threats, weather concerns, maintenance, and device loss for delivery of individual items.
Of course, the equation changes as soon as the drones take on additional uses, especially applications that are tied to information more than to materials. What if we had millions of Amazon drones and they had these tasks?
Tracking – Collecting information on traffic conditions would be natural, but detailed information could also be gathered on crops, pests, animal populations, and crowds. Of course, many eyes in the sky that can be redirected to get closer looks are perfect for spying and surveillance.
Signal relays – The more devices there are in the air, the more opportunities there are to bounce or rebroadcast communications. Ad hoc mesh networks would expand the potential for communications applications.
Chemical sensing – There already have been attempts to use sensing cell phones to collect information on air pollution . Having a fleet continuously stationed in the air would provide continuous monitoring, broadening our understanding of pollution dynamics and making it more likely that problems would be detected early.
Weather data – The movie Twister’s bevy of sensors that get sucked into a tornado is fiction, of course. However, there have been attempts to put sensors in the paths of tornadoes and it is now routine for aircraft to fly into the eyes of hurricanes to take measurements. As the density of drones (or other flying things with sensors) increases, many are likely to be in the right place at the right time to gather valuable data and extend our knowledge of weather.
Advertising – Let’s hope this doesn’t happen.
It would be interesting to consider a scenario that includes solar power drones and systems that include lighter than air (or hybrid) craft. Both of these might reduce energy costs, and tiny blimps or zeppelins could reduce the noise pollution. (Light cargo only. Helium has a lifting force of one gram per liter. Paperback books weigh about 200 grams.)
Of course, the Internet of Things already has a presence above our heads. Satellites, dishes, and communications towers collect, transfer, combine, and share data. These are a given in most IoT scenarios, as they should be. Looking at drones provides new opportunities, but I suspect the real game changer is development of aircraft smaller than Amazon’s, bird- or insect-sized devices, coordinated and able to sweep the skies like a murmuration of starlings.