Mobile World Congress featured many different drones for many different purposes and applications. While I wouldn't claim to have seen all or even most of them, I managed to go to the GSMA seminar 'The Internet of the Skies – Connecting Drones'. Key topics of the seminar included:
- The support of safe BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line Of Sight) and autonomous operation of unmanned aircraft (UA)
- The use of mobile connectivity to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of UA, by enabling BVLOS operation, supporting real-time data transmissions from on-board cameras and sensors
- Mobile connectivity requirements for registration and identification, flight planning and approval, the transmission of meteorological information, geo-fencing, geo-caging and tracking
The best thing is that the presentations are available for anyone interested. Link at the bottom of this post. I have embedded some videos from the seminar in the playlist as well.
Interesting to hear about @TelefonicaIoT Antifire drones here at #MWC19 - can help with couple of UN SDG's pic.twitter.com/8J1Ps0ttTl— Parallel Wireless (@Parallel_tw) February 26, 2019
During the seminar, Telefônica talked about their fire fighting Antifire drones which are helping detect, survey and combat fires before, during and after a fire breaks out.
Turkcell talked about their Dronecell. The 5G connected drone can be used for many different purposes from inspection, photos and videos to providing temporary coverage in case of disasters. One of the interesting use cases was also surveillance (see video). They are also working with a local drone company, see here. For Dronecell they are testing with different vendors like Huawei, Airspan, etc. and also have their own hardware (see pic above).
More drone innovation at #MWC19 from @mansLMT - like the tagline, endless opportunities 👍 pic.twitter.com/7UWMS9fDWP— Parallel Wireless (@Parallel_tw) February 26, 2019
The Latvian mobile operator Mans LMT talked about how Drones in combination with Sensors and AI can provide endless opportunities. In addition drones can also be used for delivering goods and rescue missions. Finally, LMT with Lufthansa Systems are working on a mobile, connected UTM platform for drone solutions and traffic management (see video below).
A perfect start to second day of #MWC19, bumping into our old colleague Rob Joyce at @ooredoo stand and then getting a virtual ride in 5G aerial taxi. Loved it! pic.twitter.com/GSKyF5Day7— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) February 26, 2019
In addition enjoyed a virtual ride in Ooredoo’s 5G-enabled Aerial Taxi. Also happened to bump into Robert Joyce who used to work for Telefonica O2 UK and used to be very active in O2's small cells rollout during 2012 London Olympics. See here, here & here.
Huawei showed SkySite: A Drone with 5G base station & '5G Book' RRU. I blogged about it here.
Saudi Telecom Company (STC) had a drone flight simulator. I didn't see it but tweet below
— bertrand mocquet (@BertrandMocquet) February 28, 2019
There were 10 Catalonian companies showing smart drones. Tweet below
Èxit d’assistència a l’estand Catalonia Smart Drones durant el #MWC19. Hi van participar 10 empreses i entitats del sector #UAV català i una representació dels @mossos i d'@agentsruralscat. https://t.co/drw6pnnkuE pic.twitter.com/uH4ZUl8y9D— Catalonia Smart Drones (@CataloniaDrones) March 5, 2019
Finally, Samsung Electronics, Cisco and Orange unveiled "A Drone carrying a very low latency, high-quality video system is piloted from the Orange booth at the Fira de Barcelona. The drone, which is located outdoors at an Orange datacenter, carries a 5G router (CPE) that is used to transfer commands to the drone and transmit a high-quality video feed with low latency. At the Orange booth, the pilot can be seen controlling the drone by using a 5G tablet. Aeromedia, a leading drone operator, collaborated in this demo." Sadly, I didn't manage to find this and couldn't see any videos either.
Here is a video playlist of Drones from MWC.
I am also running a webinar next week looking at 5G @ MWC 2019 on behalf of Parallel Wireless (#PWTechTrain) . Along with drones, I plan to talk about lot more things. Register here.
Presentations from "MWC19 Barcelona Seminar: The Internet of the Skies – Connecting Drones" available here.
GSMA IoT contains good amount of information on drones. Link.
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