GoPro To Become Apple Of Consumer UAV Market

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, consumer UAV market will be worth $130 million in 2015.

By comparison, GoPro has generated $673 million in sales in the first nine months of this year. Over the past few months, Google and Facebook have acquired UAV companies. Amazon is also working to use drones to deliver goods. But none of them have made UAVs for consumers.

Dominic Basulto of The Washington Post says that GoPro could become the “innovation champion” of the consumer UAVs industry, just like Apple in the smartphone industry, Facebook in social networking and Amazon in e-commerce. The action camera make has joined the Small UAV Coalition, a UAV-lobbying group, indicating that the company is serious about consumer UAVs.

GoPro has several advantages that could make it a consumer UAV leader. These include the first-mover advantage and network effects. However, it will have to create an ecosystem that makes rivals impossible to catch up. Basulto says GoPro is the only company that has the potential to make consumer UAVs mainstream: Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported the company was working on UAVs that will be launch in late 2015, at a price between $500 and $1000.

Teal Group: 2014 UAVs integrated market study

"Our coverage of the civil UAV market continues to grow with each annual report, mirroring the gradual increase in the civil market itself" said Philip Finnegan, Teal Group's director of corporate analysis and an author of the study. "Our 2014 UAV study calculates the UAV market at 89% military, 11% civil cumulative for the decade, with the numbers shifting to 86% military and 14% civil by the end of the 10-year forecast." he added.

Teal Group analysts, in their 2014 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) integrated market study, estimate that UAV spending will nearly double over the next decade from current worldwide UAV expenditures of $5.7 billion annually to $9.9 billion, totaling just over $77 billion in the next ten years. The new study covers more than 40 U.S., European, South African and Israeli companies, and reveals the fundamental reshaping of the industrial environment as UAV technology proliferates worldwide.

"The Teal Group study predicts that the US will account for 65% of the worldwide RDT&E spending on UAV technology over the next decade, and 53% of the procurement," said Teal Group senior analyst Steve Zaloga, another author of the study. Regarding payloads "The overall UAV electronics market will continue to be the world's fastest-growing aerospace payload market, but not through continued growth of 'the usual suspects' from the past decade," said Dr. David Rockwell, author of the electronics portion. The study also includes a UAV Manufacturers Market Overview that reflects the worldwide UAV market: "Again continuing as one of the prime areas of growth for defense and aerospace companies, the UAV market continues to evolve and become an increasingly global market," said Philip Finnegan. 

¿Is the Additive Manufacturing the future technology for UAV manufacturing?

Years ago, University of Southampton researchers, led by Jim Scanlan, a professor of aerospace design, scored a world first when they built and flew a UAV constructed entirely from parts made by additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.

That original UAV, four iterations ago, was smaller, with a 4-foot wingspan. Since then, Scanlan’s team – armed with a £3m UK government grant – has been successfully working to prove that drones can be designed, built and tested in the relatively time-warp speed of less than two weeks using additive manufacturing.

But now Scanlan has set his sights on an even larger target: "All cargo aircraft will soon be unmanned,” Scanlan says. More boldly, Scanlan also believes that large cargo planes –assembled from 3D-printed parts – can soon be flying the skies using inexpensive, off-the-shelf communications technologies, instead of relying on expensive, and yet-to-be developed, sense-and-avoid systems. To prove his point, Scanlan’s started a program called HIATUS, for Highlands and Islands Aerial Transport using Unmanned Systems, that he hopes will, within 18 months, use 3D-printed drones, each about half the size of a small Cessna and flying semi-autonomously, to ferry goods to remote islands in Europe that have poor transportation links and are often inaccessible because of fog and bad weather. “Our unmanned aircraft,” he insists, “is perfectly happy flying in fog.”

“Drones will soon be part of everyone’s lives,” says Amanda Stainer, commercial director of the biennial Farnborough International Airshow, which runs from July 14th to 20th. There are 78 companies displaying UAV technologies, a nearly four-fold increase from the 22 that took part in the 2012 show. “It’s pretty buzzing,” she says of drone systems. “People obviously see it as the future.” A 2012 report by US aviation consultants Teal Group estimated that, by 2022, annual spending on UAVs would jump from $6.6 billion to $11.4 billion, for a total of $89 billion over the decade.