All right, so welcome to this next section, which is on drones and the industry surrounding them. And to get one thing really out of the way as quickly as possible, I just wanted to address the notion that a lot of people do consider, which is that drones are toys and that they're not, you know, a particularly big new technology or industry or anything like that. People just see them as these fun toys that some people buy and they fly them around. And you know, it's like a remote controlled helicopter or car or something like that, like they're good for toys or getting, you know, fancy photos or something like that. But they're not, you know, a new industry or a new shift in technology or anything that serious but I want to sort of address this as completely wrong. I mean, they is totally a variable.

Big industry surrounding drones as fun to fly there's, you know, competitive drone flying is using, you know, DJI drones, like the Mavic or the, you know, Phantom series drones to get fantastic footage and photos and holiday pictures and all that sort of stuff that is a very big part of the drawings in general. But there's a lot of other things out there that a lot of people don't know about if they're not in that particular industry or making use of it, and can go a bit more under the radar, but they are a very big, you know, industry in themselves and just a few of the current things. So this isn't like far future technologies or uses that people are thinking about using. These are actual uses that people use drones for today and in the past. So just go through a quick list of them, just to show you and some of the things are infrastructure inspection and photography.

So taking photos of say hi up how lines or, you know, those sorts of things on mobile phone towers is another big sort of category for them. Search and Rescue is another thing. There's been numerous cases of drones actually saving people's lives by being able to search for and therefore rescue them in a much quicker timeframe. There's thermal imaging sensing to see cracks or other structural issues that, you know, again, coming back to that sort of infrastructure inspection and even search and rescue, you know, at nighttime using infrared and those sorts of thermal imaging sensors. There's the insurance and building construction inspections and industries in that sort of regard where, you know, sure, if you're inspecting a house that's burnt down, you're probably not going to use a drone. But in some bigger cases where say the entire hotel resort has been, you know, destroyed by typhoon or something like that.

They can use drones to get a much better picture of the damage that's been done in the future. No doing the actual assessment work that isn't necessarily possible at ground level. There's also more sort of out there things that again, people don't really know about, but does already exist currently and things like planting of new trees via compressed air firing seeds into the ground, so the drone will be flying along and will actually fire you know, seeds into the ground which new trees will grow from. There's also drone delivery with a variety of things from, you know, the more well known and popular amazon prime air to other things like Google and their projects. And, you know, these have been used to deliver everything from burritos to pizza to sushi, lots of lots of stuff. There's, you know, more important sort of life saving type things that drones are being used for, such as delivering blood or medication or transferring blood or medication.

And there's also automated pesticide fertilizers, herbicide deployments, all these sorts of things for agriculture as well. So these are just some of the current day uses. And you know, you can even see in these videos here where, you know, these are real businesses that people are running right now, they're making huge differences in the world using these types of drones. And, again, another common thing is when people think of drones, they only think of the tiny little, you know, toys that people fly around. And they think that that's the end of the story. But as you can see from a lot of these examples, drones, and that industry in general doesn't just mean that it can mean fixed wing airplanes that are actually autonomously flying.

It can mean you know, huge, you know, octo, copters, or even right up to the point where they're actually looking into now, which is basically having autonomous helicopter type, you know, capabilities where they'll be flying people around, but that is actually a little bit more in the future. Everything else has been already currently done and is available today. You also have many other use cases, especially when it comes to drone swarms. So you probably would have seen the 2018 Winter Olympics in the opening ceremony and how they had a swarm of drones that actually, you know, despite a fantastic, you know, piece of art, and you know, it was a very novel use of drones. But again, it just sort of describes the many, many different things that you can do with drones. And it's an industry that is, you know, absolutely growing even more and more, even at the start of just 2018.

There were over a million people registered with the FAA in America that were actually flying drones. On top of that there's over about 70,000 businesses and over, you know, just thousands and thousands and millions of people, you know, dealing with drones using them, and it's certainly a growing industry currently. On top of that you have you know, some of The most cutting edge technology which was coming out of new company called skydio, and then new drawing the r1. So this is a drawing that while it's a little bit more expensive, it's obviously the newer technology. So it's a bit more pricey. But again, it is more in terms of that category of a toy in terms of your flying getting video for your consumer market type person, but the underlying technology will likely grow into many other fields that I mentioned before and that is the technology to autonomously fly itself really, really well.

So there is you know, autonomous flying but for the most part for most drones, it's get up high and go basically you know, there's no obstacles up there. It's just open air they can fly from one point to the other quite successfully. Whereas Scotty O's Jordan actually can fly through trees around trees, you know, around obstacles. And while it's doing this, keep you in frame and get some fantastic footage of yours. Well, all, by itself, you know, usually you would have to have someone controlling that and flying through the trees and all these sorts of complicated aerial maneuvers. But this does it all by itself.

So fantastic new technology that will most likely get integrated and, you know, push things even further, as well as those autonomous flying things. You've also got fleet management, which again, comes back to these sort of swarms of drones, the swarms of drones that Intel displayed at the Winter Olympics was sort of one unified system. Fleet Management is more about you know, more individual drones, but managing many individual drones in a flight for something for example, like during delivery. Now, it is a very, very fast moving industry, this drones, they've been around for roughly about five or more years or so. And since then, it's been going absolutely crazy as you can imagine. And because it's such a fast moving industry, it will you no more need Be sort of kept an eye on a bit more than maybe some of the other ones.

But, you know, it's something that I find very, very exciting. And some of the, you know, use cases that people are using are truly quite amazing and helping a lot of people that really need it. One of the main things that is actually sort of slowing it down, I guess you could call it is the regulation behind drone delivery or, you know, really big fleets of autonomous drones operating. So currently, you generally for most countries have this sort of band of air that's, you know, just below web proper full on airplanes and helicopters fly. But above, you know, the 30 meter height where, you know, cars and buildings generally might be. And that sort of band of air is where most drones operate.

And at the moment, they're sort of discussing legalities, they're trying to develop these fleet monitoring systems, these, you know, services and software that come can use to manage maybe 100 or 1000 drones to do whatever it is that they want to do, maybe they're doing inspections of lots of properties, maybe they're wanting to deliver burritos, it doesn't particularly matter. But, you know, these systems have to integrate, they have to be, you know, mostly autonomous because the drones themselves are autonomous. And they also have to sort of interact and play nice with the existing infrastructure that is used to manage and you know, track and all that sort of stuff, proper regular aircrafts out there. So this is kind of slowing the industry down a little bit because they can't roll out full on autonomous delivery drone networks without that software and systems set up as well as the government approval, which is the probably the biggest thing at the moment to sort of give them more authority to autonomously just essentially fly drones wherever they need to be flown.

So that is one of the few things that's actually slowing this industry down a little bit but By all measurements, it's still incredibly fast paced industry, that these are all things that are happening today. So that's the general sort of overview of where the industry is now. In the next part, we'll again have a look at the industry's future opportunities. We'll also go over some potential jobs that you know, you might be able to get in the future so we'll have a chat about it, then.