Vol.52 For the drone industry in Japan next year [Hisunori Haruhara's drone trend watching] | DRONE

This is the last column of this year, but there have been various movements in the drone area in 2021 as well. I think the degree of progress varies depending on how you are involved in the drone.

Looking back on 2021

As for drone-related news, the outline of the system design for the lifting of the ban on Level 4 (non-visual flight in densely populated areas) next year has been announced, but aircraft registration, aircraft certification, flight qualification, etc. Was getting a lot of attention.

From the perspective of whether the drone-related business will grow dramatically with the lifting of the Level 4 ban, I feel that it is not directly linked. This is because, in terms of drone business development, the center is areas other than densely populated areas, and areas such as inspections, surveying, and wide-area surveys are becoming indispensable areas.

However, with the lifting of the Level 4 ban, we will once clear the legal system goals of drones that the country has drawn as a roadmap, and concentrate on how to link them to the utilization of drones. It should be taken positively in that it can be done.

Also, in Japan, the news of drone logistics is often taken up as news of drones. As I mentioned in my last column, "Drone Service Providers," Zipline is the only company that is doing well worldwide in drone logistics, and others are exploring.

Especially in Japan, drone logistics is one of the areas that I was very conscious of in this roadmap to Level 4. As Level 4 as a system is completed, it is important to realistically verify whether this drone logistics will become a business or whether it is appropriate as a means of regional infrastructure. Let's go. Looking at overseas cases, the closest thing to that is probably the transportation of medicines and serum (light weight, high unit price and high added value).

However, in Japan, considering that roads are relatively well maintained in any area, it is not possible to consider the combination with autonomous vehicles (like autonomous carts) on land. It's important.

The drone industry itself has benefited from the projects of various national and local governments, which have been called national professionals. It would have been difficult to proceed with the demonstration experiment if there was no such thing in the background of drone logistics. In addition, many "national professionals" were running in fields such as inspection, agriculture, and disaster prevention, and they are still running.

However, what the drone industry itself should be aware of is that its axis as a country is shifting to "flying cars," which are regarded as the same drone category. The center of institutional design as a country in the future will shift to "flying cars".

The system design of a "flying car" has a much higher hurdle than the "drone", and the amount of work in each ministry and agency increases, so the budget will be used for the system design as well. I won't comment on the pros and cons of itself here, but in any case, the composition of the "flying car" business will be in the area called mobility, unlike conventional drones. Perhaps it will be a less relevant area for many drone operators.

From now on, it will be essential for drone-related businesses to recreate their business plans, keeping in mind how to properly run their businesses in the private sector. During the year-end and New Year holidays, it will be important to think carefully about collecting information and rebuilding the business, and to take that action at the beginning of the year.

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Personally, at these certain points of change, I often watch overseas movements. In that sense, I also wanted to understand what kind of business model the world's top 3 service providers are in the previous column. The movement of the United States will be helpful as a fragment of the drone's business puzzle during the year-end and New Year holidays. As I mentioned in my previous column, "The Drone Industry Entering a New Stage," the drone platform is solidifying with PX4 in the United States.

PX4 is a flight code that has returned to the center of the 2016 split in open source camps such as Dronecode. To briefly explain the division, since Ardupilot, which was the main flight code of Dronecode until then, was GPLv3, as an internal function of Ardupilot, when incorporating intellectual property software, the source code of the software is disclosed. Having to do this became a problem for companies with intellectual property centered on major companies, and they switched to PX4, which is a BSD license that does not have such restrictions. See the previous column, "Dronecode Variations," for details.

Since 2016, compared to Ardupilot's steady improvement in functionality and stability, PX4 has rarely appeared until around 2018. With the advent of Auterion, co-founded by Pixhawk's creator and PX4 founder Lorenz Meier, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley and Silicon Valley-born drone industry veteran Satori, it's rapidly moving around North America. rice field. Especially in 2019, the US Department of Defense actively adopted PX4, which was a counter to DJI, and PX4 became the de facto standard in the United States at once. The author is also supporting the development of Ardupilot, and the number of inquiries about PX4 is increasing, but the overall structure is the same, but the contents are completely different.

As a feature of PX4, regarding the basic aircraft control of the multicopter, the license management is also substantial, and the services and tools for companies to manage the aircraft centering on Auterion are being enhanced. On the other hand, with regard to applied airframe control (for example, airframe control such as indoor navigation), each airframe manufacturer makes its own, and the technique is not disclosed. The PX4 may require a lot of more advanced software engineers to develop the aircraft. (Because it is more costly, it will require a large company or a more detailed business plan)

As for the movement of the drone industry in the United States, various services have begun to be created within the platform called PX4. It is very similar to the flow that various software was developed by the de facto platform called Windows on the PC. And in the United States as well, various movements are accelerating due to the LTE service for drones that started at about the same time as Japan. This is exactly like a net bubble when a PC is connected to the Internet. This means that drones have been completely incorporated into the flow of the IT and Internet industries that have been ahead of the rest of the world in the United States.

In that respect, Japan is starting to lag behind. In the United States, the central area for drone utilization was construction progress. You can also see that 3D robotics has been successfully revived with this construction progress solution "Site Scan" even though DJI's Phantom has withdrawn from the hardware business at SOLO.

Similarly, in the agricultural field, remote sensing by drone has already become established in the entire agricultural industry, and in the flow of SDGs, the value standard of agricultural land is combined with Fintech's method, such as securitization of agricultural land. Movement is also becoming more active with data acquisition from drones and other autonomous mobile robots.

The major difference between Japanese and US drones is that in Japan it was mainly a role as a work alternative such as logistics and pesticide spraying, whereas in the US it is always the edge to acquire data. It means that. From the point of view of data acquisition, the fact that the terminal is connected to the Internet can clearly be imagined that a new world will be formed there.

It seems natural that the drone industry is advancing with the involvement of existing major IT and Internet companies to the extent that the United States is a festive event. If you don't feel this fever in Japan, it's obviously becoming less sensitive and may have something to do with Japan's long stagnation. However, it has just begun to move in the United States, and Japan can still catch up. (At least the legal and institutional requirements are the same, and conversely, the environment is better in Japan)

The first thing that drone-related companies should be aware of next year is the connection of this drone to the Internet, that is, the use of LTE over the drone. The details were mentioned in the previous column "LTE sky usage service that started in earnest".

Starting on January 6th next year, the "LTE Drone Flight Experience" will be held at DDFF in Kimitsu.

First of all, I would like you to participate in such experience-based meetings, experience Internet online drones, create services from various ideas, and further activate the drone industry.