Previously known for consumer products for smartphones, tablets and cars, Paris-based Parrot recently branched into both the consumer and commercial drone businesses.

Parrot created the AR.Drone quadcopter and revealed it at CES 2010 in Las Vegas. Since then they have sold over a million of them – 700M in 2014 alone! In 2014, drones generated 34% of Parrot’s total revenue. At CES 2014 they launched two new mini drones for the retail consumer market. All appear to have done quite well during the Christmas season.

But what is particularly interesting is Parrots growth In the commercial drone sector. Parrot is acquiring companies and developing products to provide drones, software and data solutions for the agriculture, mapping and surveillance industries. To jumpstart their movement toward commercial drones, two spinoffs from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPF), senseFly and Pix4D, were invested in in 2012.

• senseFly designs and develops a line of winged drones and is soon to release a quadcopter as well. All their drones are for commercial use. senseFly’s $25K eBee drone was rated one of the Top 7 Drones for Agriculture in 2014 by DroneLife.
• Pix4D provides image processing software for mapping and modeling geo-referenced 2D images into 3D models and for a wide range of GIS and CAD applications.

Two more acquisitions in B2B (business-to-business) drones happened in 2014: Parrot invested in MicaSense and Airinov.

• MicaSense is a Seattle-based software and systems company providing advanced data gathering and processing, coupled with professional analysis tools, to provide accurate and repeatable information on the status of a crop. Raw data from the MicaSense camera, a lightweight, multispectral camera, is transformed into vegetation index maps. Powerful analytics provide time-based trends and change maps. Analysis tools such as plant population counts enable optimized farm management. Parrot invested $2M in a Series A round of funding in November, 2014.
• Airinov is a French provider of UAV farming applications and sensors for use on senseFly and other UAS. Their software can process flight and sensor data and produce fertilization recommendations which are compatible with most brands of dispenser equipment. Parrot invested $2.2M for a 20.9% equity interest in Airinov.

Henri Seydoux, Parrot’s founder, chairman and CEO, said:

We are moving forward with our external growth policy initiated in 2011 and focusing on new products with high-potential, outstanding and complementary technological expertise, applications for commercial and retail customer segments, strong operational and financial synergies. Parrot intends to meet the needs of professionals moving into the civil drone age and firmly believes in the commercial potential of this market, (on which the Parrot AR.Drone has already enabled us to gain global recognition) and I am very pleased that we can also serve the commercial drone market as well.

Agriculture is one of the fastest-growing market segments for unmanned aircraft commercial applications. The sensors required to capture accurate data are a critical part of the solution, and [our recent acquisition of MicaSense and Airinov] brings this technology to the table.

As much fun as Parrot’s drones are, there is a growing market for professional service drones for mapping, surveying, protection, real estate photography and agricultural uses. Shenzen-based Dajiang Innovation Technology (DJI) has sold over 400M of their line of consumer and B2B drones; San Francisco startup Skycatch has partnered with one of the largest heavy machinery makers, Komatsu, to automate construction and mining job sites world wide using drones, mapping software and various sensors.

• There is also a steadily growing defense and first-responder market led by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, AeroVironment, Elbit and Northrup Grumman. The Global UAV Market 2015-2025 projects the global defense UAV market to grow at a 5.66% CAGR from 2014 to 2025 with North America and Europe the largest markets and the military drone segment (UCAV – unmanned combat aerial vehicle) to dominate the UAV market.
• But the real good news is Wintergreen Research’s report entitled “Commercial Drones: Highways in the Sky, UAS, Market Shares, Strategies and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2015 to 2021” (whew!) which projects commercial drone growth at 34.3% CAGR over the period from 2014 to 2021. That’s game-changing growth!

Photo Essay
Six months ago, Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippine’s South East coast. Now Drone Adventures is helping the reconstruction effort by providing much-needed aerial maps of the region.

When Typhoon Haiyan, known as Yolanda in the Philippines, struck the South East coast of the country six months ago, on November 8, 2013, it devastated entire communities – tearing apart thousands of homes and destroying livelihoods. Many of those worst hit were ‘informal’ unplanned homes, situated at or near the water’s edge.

One of the humanitarian organisations that stepped up to help was Swiss-based Medair, which is dedicated to relieving human suffering in some of the world’s most remote and badly affected places. However after arriving in the country just 48 hours after Yolanda struck and conducting their initial assessments, the Medair team soon discovered that accurate, up-to-date maps of the region didn’t exist, with communities often having to rely on either hand-drawn maps or outdated Google versions.

This data gap is why Medair asked Drone Adventures to get involved. Over the course of six days in March 2014, our team helped Medair to:

• Create detailed 2D base maps and 3D terrain models of Tacloban, Dulag and Julita municipalities
• Assess typhoon damage and plan shelter reconstruction

We then further expanded our activities, visiting different communities on or near the East coast of Leyte island and providing leaders with physical high-resolution maps they could use to assess the situations in their communities and plan reconstruction efforts based on current, accurate data.

Mapping Dulag

Known as ‘Liberation Town’, Dulag is a settlement of 50,000 residents, located 36 km (22 miles) south of the administrative capital of Leyte island, Tacloban. Typhoon Haiyan made landfall just south of Dulag.

Dulag was where Medair started its work, rolling out a project to provide the most vulnerable families in the municipality with what the organization calls ‘core homes’. These dwellings offer a family disaster-proof foundations, a strong wooden frame, and a roof.  But that is all. Each family must then – with support from Medair – take ownership of its future by completing the rest of the home itself by creating all the walls, floors and interior features they require. To date, Medair has built 600 shelters, providing 3,000 people with homes.

When Medair first contacted Drone Adventures, its team had already started to collect geographic data, marking down for example the GPS co-ordinates of homes in the area and recording family details for each. However what staff were missing was up-to-date, high-resolution base maps that they could use to assess villages, see where people are currently living, monitor reconstruction work and more.

The Medair team did have access to existing local maps, produced most likely through local ground assessments, however these were not geographically accurate, for example in terms of road locations and distances.

Medair staff were also keen to assess the local environmental damage caused by Yolanda, since many local livelihoods depend on natural resources like coconut trees. Many of these trees had either been decapitated by the typhoon or completely uprooted, with whole forests completely wiped out in some areas. Therefore we also mapped these regions, shown below, as part of our work in Dulag.

The Gift of Geography

In addition to working with Medair to assess storm damage and create base maps, our team also produced physical maps to gift to four different communities on the island: Barangay 105, Julita, Dulag and Cabacongan.

Our approach before arriving in a new area was to start by getting local buy-in. So we would first contact the local ‘barangay’ (barrio) captain – effectively the village mayor – to explain who we were and what kind of data we could offer.

The response was always positive.

Leaders were excited by the opportunity of having their own accurate maps. Captains and their teams might only be using hand-drawn maps at present – never mind having computers with internet access – but they all understand how much value up-to-date, highly accurate geographic information can bring and the transformative effect proper maps could have on their work.

Our typical workflow was to arrive on site in the morning, fly our drones, and then, in the evening, process the several hundred images we had acquired that day. We would then visit the nearest local print shop and print the resulting map on a giant tarpaulin sheet, presenting this to barangay leaders the next day.

It is difficult to overstate what a difference it makes to give a community a real, physical map. With a large high-resolution photo in their hands, people have something they can gather around and start using right away. And while many towns don’t have staff on hand who know how to work with geographic information systems (GIS) – and outputs like 3D digital surface models – everyone can appreciate and benefit from an accurate bird’s-eye view of their community.

Meeting the Mayor

Before we left the Philippines, we headed further north to Tacloban, the capital of the Eastern Visayas region, to meet Mayor Alfred Romualdez.

The city is home to 200,000 people and was all but destroyed by the typhoon and its resulting storm surges. Numerous families lost their homes, particularly those who had built in unsafe, unplanned locations – so called ‘informal’ developments – near the seafront.

Following the creation of a new planning law that bans the building of homes within 40 meters (131 ft) of the waterfront, the mayor had assigned a large unused plot of land, near Barangay 105, to re-house displaced families. This area is sub-divided into numerous plots, which are individually sponsored by a range of donor organizations from around the world, each responsible for building a section of this resilient new community.

Since the mayor’s existing map of the region was far from perfect, our goal role was to produce a high-definition image – hosted online – which both Mayor Romualdez’s team and donor organizations could use to make better decisions and more accurately direct rebuilding efforts.

Several drone flights later and the two images below show the difference in accuracy achieved between the mayor’s previous plan and his new drone-sourced image of the same area.

Project Statistics

During the course of our six-day trip, our two-man team, together with our Medair partners, flew 29 drone mapping flights in total with a combined flight time of 11.6 hours. We mapped 48.6 sq km (18.8 sq mi) of land and acquired 5,139 images.

These images were used to create four high-resolution maps – of Barangay 105, Cabacongan, Julita and Dulag – plus seven additional low-res versions of surrounding countryside. The typical ground resolution of these orthomosaics was 5 cm (1.96 in) per pixel for villages and 8-10 cm (3.1 – 3.9 in) for larger areas.

The value of our Philippines mission was perhaps best summed up by one of Medair’s own staff, Rob Fielding. In the organization’s report on its first drone experience – online here – he comments:

Drones do not have a good reputation. People associate them with the military and think of them as weapons, but they can also be used for good. We are using the images taken by the drones to carry out damage assessments, to identify land that could be safer to relocate families to and to see where recovery efforts are taking place. Relief organisations are increasingly using drones to provide services not otherwise possible, and we intend to use them in response to future emergencies.

Read Medair’s report on its work in Dulag.

The Drone Adventures team used senseFly eBee mapping drones and Pix4D software for data processing and orthomosaic generation. A special thanks to our friends at Mapbox for hosting all our data online.

For more photos of our Philippines mission, check out the full photo gallery.

This article was originally posted on Drone Adventures. If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Fukushima photo essay: A drone’s eye view
• Drone Adventures in Haiti
• A discussion on deploying drones for international development
• Ten lessons for farm drones
• Robots Podcast: Drone Journalism
• TED Global 2013 speaker Lian Pin Koh on “Conservation Drones”

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

… Two events, from different parts of the world, on the same day and subject: geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) and the use of “layering” to map, analyze and design.
… Today is 4-H National Youth Science Day, and 4-H Maps & Apps will be introduced to millions of American youth to exhibit and examine the power of geospatial technologies. “We created this year’s experiment to inspire young people to be critical thinkers by embracing a technology that can help change and shape communities in innovative ways.”
… Also today, senseFly, the Swiss start-up recently acquired by French wireless devices provider Parrot (also famed for providing the AR.Drone quadcopter), announced that they will begin providing swarm technology for mapping. The new swarm capability has been incorporated into senseFly’s ground control software and includes in-flight collision avoidance and shared waypoints.
… Spectacular video showing how mapping the Paris Air Show is done using two ebee drones and senseFly’s new swarm technology.

University of Sheffield (UK) AI and Robotics Professor Noel Sharkey (red tie) leading a group to protest killer robots.

Drones aren’t the only killer robots being discussed. There are also armed border robots in Israel and Korea, automatic missile defense systems on land and ships in many countries, and police surveillance drones. Except in the case of incoming missile defense, we don’t presently have the artificial intelligence capabilities to autonomously pick targets and implement armed attacks. In fact, we are many years away from that reality. Yet the headlines are written as if it is already happening.

Armed with Hellfire missiles, General Atomics Predator drone prepares for take-off.

“Killer robots” is a “sell-papers” type of issue. It uses enflamed rhetoric because of America’s prolonged and very public use of armed drones to kill terrorists (albeit with a committee of human pilots and operators that actually pull the trigger even though they are thousands of miles away from the action) and the anger and moral, ethical and legal backlash to that.

Nevertheless, these scary headlines, which call for banning drones of all types, are obscuring the worth of forthcoming commercial applications for unmanned and autonomous flying robots. Unmanned aerial vehicles and systems (UAV and UAS) in agriculture, for mapping and surveying, for search and rescue, disaster relief, science, border patrol and a myriad other applications will begin to appear in America in 2016 (earlier in the EU and Australia where they aren’t as limited by the FAA as are the Americans).

There is no denying the commercial value of these new UASs. One story involving drones occurred recently in Haiti — it has all the elements of smart business, enterprising activists, the fun of flying, and the pleasure of helping. But this story didn’t receive any headlines.

Adam Klaptocz is an engineer and project manager with senseFly, a Swiss spin-off from the EPFL (and recently acquired by the Parrot Group). senseFly makes drones for mapping. Their eBee drone can take pictures down to 2″ precision. Adam and another senseFly employee, Emanuele Lubrano, independently founded a non-profit organization, Drone Adventures, to focus on humanitarian, conservation and cultural uses of drones beyond just mapping. Their first project – funded entirely by donations and grants from the IOM – was a two-week trip to Haiti. You can read about their adventure in a recent Robohub article.

Haiti has endured several recent natural disasters including a terrible earthquake at the beginning of 2010, a violent cholera epidemic at the end of 2010 and Hurricane Sandy at the end of 2012. Disasters not only result in casualties but they also change the landscape of the country; buildings and roads are destroyed and refugees create ever-moving encampments. There is a continuous need for up-to-date imagery for aid distribution, reconstruction and disaster relief.

The Drone Adventures video below shows the fun, the involvement, the flexibility and the need. Bravo to these two adventurers and their new organization.

Although Parrot and senseFly didn’t fund Drone Adventures, they think the project is creative and might want to take part in future missions.

I’m worried that all the negative headlines – and fear reactions to those headlines – may lead to legislation which could hamper the natural emergence of this new and very capable technology. Hence the headline of this article: Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

Parrot’s AR.Drone without styrofoam bumper guard (top) and with (bottom).

As an aside, part of the business plan for selling the AR.Drones is to also sell parts to repair the devices when they crash – an inevitable outcome of the adventure of flying them. Parrot has made buying replacement parts easy and provides visual tutorials on how to install replacement parts and make needed repairs. A bit like printer companies selling their own brand of paper and ink.

Henri Seydoux, Founder, Chairmen and CEO, Parrot SA.

For more information about the eBee, check out one of our previous posts.

In July, the Parrot Group partnered with senseFly, a Swiss start-up and spin-off from the Swiss EPFL, and invested $5.3 million to help senseFly grow. Their initial plan was to develop a high volume manufacturing capability and fund rapid growth and new product development. The eBee is the first such product from that venture. The just announced 3′ wingspan eBee can fly for 45 minutes in 45km/hr winds, and will enable users to take their own aerial photos and produce precise ortho-mosaics and 3D models. senseFly has also established an impressive global network of resellers which presently excludes the US (because of FAA regulatory limitations). The eBee meets the special needs of mining and surveying professionals because of its wind resistance and robustness, high precision 3D image processing and mission planning software.

senseFly, working with another Parrot Group partner and another EPFL spin-off (with a similarly intentioned $2.5 million equity investment from Parrot to spur growth and development), Pix4D, has developed a suite of software which can create a flight path and take 2D geotagged images and then process them into 3D maps.

Below is an EPFL/Pix4D video displaying additional information about the process of filming, tagging and creating 3D maps and images.

When senseFly’s UAVs are allowed into civilian airspace, there are a myriad uses:

• Aerial photography
• Mapping
• Mine and quarry surveys
• Emergency response
• Agricultural and cattle monitoring
• Remote sensing
• Surveying (general and archeological)
• Urban and regional planning
• Infrastructure management
• Etc.

 

As civilian airspace opens to drones like those from senseFly, the sky begins to offer unique perspectives to view and understand our environment. One can see a near-term future where images and data can be captured at low cost, anywhere, any time, and without complex infrastructure or long preparation time and transformed into useful management tools, maps and surveys.

 

“We are witnessing a revolution whereby flying drones are no longer exclusive to the military but are quickly spreading into the civilian world. In 2010, Parrot surprised competitors and fellow researchers alike when they hit the market with their iPhone-piloted quadcopter for filming and gaming. The same year, senseFly revolutionized the job of surveyors by providing fully autonomous flying cameras capable of producing precise 2D and 3D maps within minutes. Both companies are focused on developing very lightweight drones with the strong belief that this is critical to their use by the public at large – far beyond the military”, says Jean-Christophe CEO and co-founder of senseFly.

 

Last week, SenseFly and Pix4D announced deals with drone maker Parrot, in which Parrot will invest in both companies, 5 million Swiss francs in SenseFly and 2.4 million in Pix4D. Both spinoffs of EPFL, SenseFly and Pix4D have a history of cooperation, with SenseFly providing the camera-equipped UAVs for which they have also developed navigational software that allows them to fly complete missions autonomously, and Pix4D providing the software that transforms the thousands of images produced by the drones into unified geographical information. (Kudos to Engadget for their prompt reportage.)