Frontiers in drones

Arthur Erickson is co-founder of Helio Agro Drones, a company that develops and manufactures agri drones in the U.S.. I asked him what is the most exciting frontier for drones? What really excites me being an engineer? We've got batteries coming down the line that already exist in laboratories, in academic settings. They've got different formulations than your typical lithium ions that you see right now on drones and cell phones. Now they've got stuff like lithium, sulfur, they've got aluminum iron, which isn't really lithium based at all. And these newer batteries are getting thousands of cycles out of them. They're flying for hours, even with heavy payloads. So right now, a big hang up for a lot of farmers is I've got a different perspective, but a lot of farmers find it, at least in theory, inconvenient to have multiple batteries for the drone that you're swapping throughout the day. It gets down to a rhythm and a science once you're actually out there. So I don't think it's too bad, but a lot of farmers do have that hang up. So I think that the introduction of this new battery technology that's coming in the next few years here is going to make the drones even more appealing to a wider audience, because now you can't even make that argument as an adopter, as a farmer saying, Oh, I don't think it's very convenient to have multiple batteries on hand now. You'll just have one or maybe two batteries for an entire day's worth of flying. And I think that's just going to pop the market wide open. So there's plenty of people already right now that are getting great return and great value to these drones, but it's just going to be that much more convenient, even more valuable for these future adopters of the technology. To see Ericsson's drones in action. Google Helio Agro Drone. That’s HYLIO.