Drones can do more than just aerial photography.

There are some signs that the drone market is cooling. In 2016, more than 100 drone manufacturers participated in the CES International Consumer Electronics Show, but in 2017, there were less than 40 exhibitors; in terms of capital, in the third quarter of 2016, the global drone industry was only 55 million US dollars The amount of financing, this figure was 134 million US dollars in the same period in 2015. But at the same time, more applications for drones are quietly underway, such as helping to repair jumbo jets, assisting food planting, or package delivery, bringing many business opportunities for logistics and agriculture.

"UAV manufacturers like DJI will also have toB business, but their focus is still on hardware, and what we do is software development. It can be understood that DJI is Apple, and we develop apps for the iPhone. Developers.” Jacky Hu, founder of Boonray Intelligence, told Dynamic Technology that the company is researching how to use drones to do more things. As a partner of DJI, Boonray can do more secondary development and hardware modification on DJI's drones - they have developed an app called "Boonray Filght", which can control drones with mobile phones or iPads. The drone flies automatically, and through the pre-setting path, the drone can automatically complete the flight around buildings and bridges.

What really makes it useful are some specific scenarios, such as power station inspections in the photovoltaic industry - photovoltaic power plants also generate hot spots during operation, and the overhead photovoltaic panels greatly increase the difficulty of operation and maintenance. In Boonray's solution, they replaced the camera on the drone with a camera with thermal imaging function. Boonray Flight uses image recognition technology to keep the flight path of the drone always parallel to the photovoltaic panel. By using the obtained thermal imaging pictures through the Perceive series data analysis software developed by Boonray, the location of the hot spot can be located. These data will be stored in the cloud data center built by Boonray. By connecting with the enterprise ERP system, operation and maintenance personnel can easily handle these problems.

Such products and services will also be used in some engineering surveys, such as bridge repairs—shooting work that used to take several spidermen to complete can now be completed by drones. Possible cracks or other safety hazards on the entire bridge can be recorded. Boonray has established such cooperation with some local governments. They have developed corresponding data processing software for different industries and application scenarios (such as aerial surveying and mapping, photovoltaic power station inspection, and facility maintenance). A complete solution including services and software, or just a few.

"DJI can of course do these businesses on its own, but they haven't done it yet, and they are more focused on hardware. What we do is actually based on their existing flight platform, and further develop application related to specific scenarios. Solutions and software products to provide customized services. For example, the camera of the iPhone is already very good, but there are still many people who use Meitu, and we play the role of Meitu.” Jacky Hu Say. In foreign countries, similar companies develop faster, such as Skycatch. Their job is to collect high-definition images and video information at high altitudes. Customers only need to specify the data they need to collect on Skycatch's software platform, and Skycatch can autonomously Plan how to complete the task and transmit data back to the user - their business is mainly concentrated in the construction industry, mining, solar industry and agriculture, in the mining industry, mining companies can track the amount of minerals they have dug in real time Quality assessment, and real-time analysis of other aspects of the data. Like Boonray, Skycatch is using DJI drones.

In China, drone companies mostly focus on hardware development, which Jacky Hu believes will give Boonray some first-mover advantages. From a certain point of view, the life cycle of hardware products is relatively short, and it is more difficult to break through in the mode, while the use of software and services is a more organic approach. In Jacky Hu's plan, when it occupies a large enough market share, a large database of related industries will be formed, which is another new business model. Boonray received an angel investment of several million yuan last year, and they are now seeking a new round of financing.