Heavy Investment in Obstacle Avoidance to Continue

Whether you’re an aerial photographer or an operator using drones for commercial purposes, we can all agree that comprehensive obstacle avoidance technology is vital for the industry as a whole going forwards. Not only will this ease public fears over the safety of more and more drones in the airspace, it will also embolden regulators to be a bit more liberal with legislation in the coming years. It might save clumsy pilots a few bucks, too.

A few notable consumer manufacturers have so far pioneered the way for collision avoidance systems, including DJI and Yuneec. The Phantom 4, released earlier this year, and Yuneec’s Typhoon H both come with a degree obstacle avoidance and represent big steps in an industry already moving at an incredible pace.

A new report released by Research and Markets goes in depth and forecasts the ‘sense and avoid’ technology market between 2016-2021.

In order to attain safer drone navigation and their integration in the global airspace, there is an impending need of sense and avoid system in UAVs. In terms of value, the UAV sense and avoid systems market was estimated to generate $41.52 million globally in the year 2015. The UAV sense and avoid systems market is anticipated to further develop with a significant growth rate due to an increasing number of small and large UAVs.” – Global UAV Sense-and-Avoid Systems Market – Analysis & Forecast.

That global figure of $41.5 million last year alone is pretty hefty considering how, and still relatively rare, obstacle avoidance capabilities are. With it being such a young sector, exponential growth is expected in the run up to 2021. North America is currently the most technologically advanced and highest growing region for the sense and avoid systems market, and a compound annual growth rate of 10.48% was forecast in the report.

The report also looked further into the types of obstacle avoidance being developed, especially by leading developers in North America and Europe:

At present, sense and avoid systems use cooperative and non-cooperative technology or combination of both to attain highly efficient results. These technologies include different types of components such as radar, LiDAR, Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (T-CAS), Automatic Dependant Surveillance Broadcast, and sonar among others. Cooperative technologies are being used in sense and avoid systems from past several years, due to its high precision and greater reliability as compared to non-cooperative technology. Hence, cooperative technology accounts for the lion’s share in the revenue generation.” – Global UAV Sense-and-Avoid Systems Market – Analysis & Forecast.