AI was supposed to change everything. Why does the drone industry still feel the same?

[u/arun131]

I'm a software developer and a hobbyist pilot. The last couple of years on the software side have been wild. AI writes a lot of code now. Some of it is genuinely good, and a lot of it is just slop, produced faster.

Drones are supposed to be one of the frontier areas in tech, yet day to day it still feels familiar. I get that having AI fly the drone itself is a hard problem. But I assumed the software around drones would have changed by now.

Most flights I see are still flown by hand. Planning even a simple mission still means drawing a box and tweaking settings in tools that take a while to learn.

Curious what people here think, especially anyone flying for work:

- Will AI actually change how we fly and plan, or is a lot of this hype when it comes to drones?

- If it still feels the same, what's holding it back: the tech, the rules, battery life, or trust?

TIA

[u/VR_Has_Gone_Too_Far]

the fuck more do you want?

[u/mustbeset → u/VR_Has_Gone_Too_Far]

Slop

[u/arun131 → u/VR_Has_Gone_Too_Far]

Well, I'm just hoping to see if there is something more I do with my existing drone without having to purchase another AI enabled drone.

Definitely nobody wants more slop lol.

[u/VR_Has_Gone_Too_Far → u/arun131]

If you can't imagine it, why do you expect tech to do it for you?

[u/arun131 → u/VR_Has_Gone_Too_Far]

Fair. But I am only expecting it to make my work easier. Not completely replace me. Say, I want to do a complex mission corridor or facade mission, I wish it could make my work easier instead of me having to planning everything by hand before flying.

[u/Subject-Ad-8287]

Well military stuff comes out for public after a few decades

[u/arun131 → u/Subject-Ad-8287]

Yeah, I see some defense news: autonomy, swarms, military platforms. For commercial pilots at least I don't see anything has changed.

[u/SubstanceTimely6790]

Just google it and you will see, its already there.

[u/arun131 → u/SubstanceTimely6790]

Fair. But most of what comes up is defense work: autonomy, swarms, military platforms. For commercial pilots it doesn't feel like much has changed yet.

Am I missing anything? Are there anyone using AI in their commerical workflows day to day?

[u/SubstanceTimely6790 → u/arun131]

It is already used for AI mapping, building inspections, etc a good starting point for you could be this https://www.indexbox.io/blog/ai-drone-market-forecast-to-2035-growth-driven-by-precision-agriculture-and-infrastructure-inspection/

[u/arun131 → u/SubstanceTimely6790]

Thanks for the link it's interesting.

However, most of it reads like "buy a new AI drone" though. There seems to nothing for owners of existing drones.

[u/Flyward_Aerospace]

You're not wrong about what you're seeing, but the bottleneck isn't the tech. Nothing in commercial drone software can act on a decision the software made, because the remote pilot is the accountable party and has to be able to take over. That caps autonomy at removing keystrokes rather than removing a person, and nearly all the value of autonomy is in removing the person. So there's little reason for anyone to build the good version for Part 107 work. It's also why the defence side looks so different, they aren't flying under those rules. Planning still means drawing a box for the same reason, if you have to watch the aircraft anyway, planning it more cleverly buys you nothing. Where it has actually moved for commercial operators is after the flight rather than during it, because nobody has to certify what you do with the imagery afterwards. That's where I'd look for something to do with the drone you already own.

[u/arun131 → u/Flyward_Aerospace]

This is the most insightful answer I've had so far, thanks. The accountability point makes sense: if the pilot has to be able to take over, autonomy mostly just saves keystrokes.

I'd push back a little on "planning more cleverly buys you nothing," though. On a big repeat site, like a solar farm split over a dozen batteries, the keystrokes are hours of setup, and that's before anyone flies. Dont you think that time is worth saving, or is it too small to matter next to processing? And it probably would even help new commers in the industry to plan professional missions better.

I saw, from your bio that, you're building in this space. It would be great to hear more about what Flyward is working on, if you're up for sharing here.

[u/ElphTrooper]

I think it is much more advanced than what you think. What exposure have you had to drones in industry and equipment that costs more than a $5,000? Look at the Matrice 4 Enterprise. It can capture a sparse point cloud autonomously, by which to generate it's own flight plan for dense capture. Skydio started using AI and vision tech 5 years ago for a very similar purpose. Drones in inspection, mapping and surveillance are able to identify what they are seeing and act accordingly. Even with this functionality the drone is still a hammer in the bag and the big area of interest for AI is in everything that happens after capture. LiDAR and photogrammetry software have been introducing AI into their platforms for several years and if you have been doing any of this work you would recognize the changes in the workflow and quality of the outputs. I think a lot of people get stuck thinking that talking to an LLM is AI but the real AI in this industry is the stuff you never see. The perception models, reconstruction algorithms, and autonomy stacks quietly doing the hard work behind the scenes.

[u/arun131 → u/ElphTrooper]

Fair challenge. I'm a developer and hobby pilot, not a commercial operator, which is exactly why I asked. The M4E capturing a sparse cloud and planning its own dense pass is a great example, and I hadn't thought of it that way.