Description
An aerial drone (also known as unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV) represents any aircraft that flies without the possibility of direct human intervention from within or on the drone. Drones are available in different sizes and shapes and are developed to gather data primarily to meet a multitude of various tasks and applications. The commercial UAV market is comprised of autonomous, semi-autonomous, and completely human-controlled drones with the latter becoming increasingly scare through developments in AI and safety control systems.
Commercial UAV Market Dynamics
Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are generally segmented into systems that are remotely piloted and those that have at least some degree of autonomous operation. While the consumer market is becoming increasingly interested in small unmanned aircraft systems (a subset of all UAS, typically flown for hobby and recreational purposes), the type and number of applications for UAS for business applications is rapidly expanding across a diverse array of industry verticals.
The global UAV market is comprised of commercial and military applications. Commercial drone technology includes energy and propulsion systems, automation system, collision avoidance system, airspace protection, on-board data processing, and communication data links and radio frequency spectrum capacity. The commercial drone market segment is comprised of hardware, software and services. By way of example, drone hardware includes fixed-wing drones, rotary bland drones, nano-drones, and hybrid drones.
Leading companies such as Amazon are in the early stages of deployments intended for widespread use of UAVs for retail delivery and related logistics. Drones are also anticipated to be used extensively in public safety including law enforcement, search and rescue operations. In addition, commercial drone services companies are anticipated to make a big impact on enterprise and industrial business operations.
The UAV market includes drone-enabled services such as mapping, survey, and inspection services of critical assets such as wind turbines, utility assets, and commercial properties. Accordingly, this research sees both stand-alone services companies as well as those integrated with communications service providers. By way of example, Verizon Communications purchased Skyward, which provides drone solutions to a variety of companies.
The introduction of 5G and expansion of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) infrastructure is anticipated to be a major catalyst for expanded UAV market use cases. Greater capacity and significantly lower latency afforded by 5G and MEC enable improved control and more sustainable flight. This will be the case especially in industrial automation environments involving outdoor facilities as well as enterprise asset support services such as monitoring, inspection, and surveillance.
Improvements to the 5G standard as a result of Release 17 are anticipated to make a positive impact on the UAV market in terms of connectivity, identification, and tracking. More specifically, there will be advances in terms of UAV-to-ground identification, authentication and authorization mechanisms for UAV traffic management, and improved handling for unauthorized UAVs.
Commercial UAV Market Report
This report evaluates the UAV ecosystem including vendors and service providers with an assessment of strategies, solutions, products and services. The report analyzes the market for UAVs as well as supporting hardware, software and services. The report also evaluates drone use cases and applicability of UAVs by type with consideration for various use cases including imaging, surveillance, and more.
The report provides revenue and sales volume for UAVs by type with global, regional and major country forecasts from 2021 through 2026. The report also provides global analysis of drone applications by use case in industry verticals including agriculture, real estate, energy operations, and more.
This report also evaluates supporting UAV market technologies important to unmanned aircraft systems and provides market sizing for energy and propulsion systems, automation systems, collision avoidance systems, airspace protection (including UAV jamming), on-board data processing, and communication data links and RRF spectrum capacity management.
The report also provides additional market analysis and forecasting for ancillary drone applications and services including the UAV app development ecosystem and UAVs-as-a-Service with analysis and forecasts for use cases in industry verticals including maintenance and inspection, filming and photography, surveillance, package delivery, and more.
