These are more use cases targeted for a commercial drone fleet management software that scales elastically and helps drones manage their flight path in real-time.

Case 6: So far the use cases have elaborated conveniences for drone makers, fleet operators, businesses leveraging drone for delivery, but the following use case focuses on end-users. A drone unit and a small personal fleet of drones can come in helpful for individuals such as farmers or for home security where the units fly to take aerial photo/video around a specific landmark such as a home or barn. Today a single drone is sold along with its remote-operated controller for manual flying but a small fleet of drones can also be sold if they are registered with and controlled by cloud software for specific limited activities. The end-user may download an application and scan the qrcodes off the back of drones so that the application registers them with the clouds and is able to relay commands individually to them. Then a set of predetermined algorithms can help navigate the  drones for aerial surveillance and footage. They can be launched on ad hoc basis or scheduled periodically and matched with image recognition for durations when active monitoring might help. With the potential to build different models of drones for different range and speed and the possibility to scale up the number of drones in the fleet seamlessly, this software could meet a variety of usages across sectors such as fire and rescue, pet surveillance, pest control, improved security, and many more that do not fall under the small-and-medium business category and enterprise category of use cases mentioned earlier.  With topologies that allow dedicated controller for a fleet of lightweight drones and the controller receiving input from the cloud software and relaying to the drones while sending back the sensor data from the drones, the entire compute, storage and network available from the cloud can be leveraged to overcome the limitations on what is shipped out-of-box today or enhance existing fleet of popular appliances like vacuum robots. A high volume of sensor data traffic over the internet might be considered slow for response times in near real-time to drones but they are more for guidance or changes to schedule so-to-speak for mundane activities in these limited scopes for drones. The cloud is uniquely positioned to scale up to the demands of real-time traffic.

Case 7: Federal Regulatory Compliance and Governance of drone usages and activities across tenants is a specific use case dedicated to this platform and one that can be alleviated from the responsibilities of the businesses signing up as tenants. The platform is uniquely positioned to provide a full data purview including genealogy, history, archival and auditing of every operation associated with the drones registered with the platform. Information as requested and required to be disclosed based on sub-poena sent by law enforcement agencies are easy to be drafted and responded to by the platform. For the businesses themselves, change data capture of the drone data as well as real-time information from logs and metrics stores are something that they can view for themselves and thus enforce necessary role-based access controls and auditing for their requirements on governance.

Previous use cases: DFCSUseCasesList.docx