2012/10/29
by Robert Morris
If you do, please make an introduction for me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of aviation lately. I’m trying to write a major piece for Patrick Egan at sUAS News and also thinking about this for reasons related to my business. I’m not sure that we in the unmanned aviation community have done enough to think about what the future of the aviation industry is like. Clayton Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next has a great discussion of disruption in aviation, but even though it was written in 2004, it makes nary a mention of unmanned aircraft. Steve Morris at MLB Company also was kind enough to have lunch with me last week and talk about what he sees coming.
Photo Credit: DARPA / DTIC.mil
Hypothesized Developments in Aviation from Unmanned Aircraft:
-Aircraft building, particularly on the low end will approach a commodity industry more analogous to PCs or cellphones than current aircraft building paradigms.
-Unmanned aircraft companies (both builders and operators) are going to look more like software or networking companies than they are going to look like industrial companies, this has implications for both human resource practices and the capital structure of the companies.
-Scheduling, routing, and planning will be done according to the new paradigm. Currently in aviation, everything is optimized around getting the most out of any particular flight hour or unit of plane time. Unmanned flips this on its head and allows for the aircraft to be treated like other tools that wait on the main job. Don’t know when you’ll need the plane up? That’s okay, we’ll park it in the sky (maybe doing a lower value mission) until you need it. Want to go from point A to B? Great we’ll take you there, directly, when you want to go. We will not worry about crew duty cycles, hubs, or returning the plane to its home base.
-Large airports will loose their centrality to the system–this is not to say they will experience a decline in traffic, but rather, they will not be the key limits on a network-like system of small airfields and ad hoc landing or operating sites (think more like a heliport than an airport).
Predicted Market Effects:
-Differentiation and customization will likely become the norm in unmanned aircraft operations. Most airlines are pretty undifferentiated, but when the business customer is going to tie their ERP system to their aerial service provider’s dispatch system and automatically task aerial missions based on orders, sustained relationships and differentiated services are going to be much more meaningful.
-Data gathering / reconnaissance is likely to switch almost entirely to unmanned systems after the FAA changes the rules.
-Air Cargo is going to be significantly changed, mostly at the interface between trucking and air, with more work being done by air and less by trucking.
-In the long run personalized aviation, whether that is passenger aviation or other types of aviation consumption is going to be the big development. Aircraft of today are like mainframes of the 70’s. Only anointed experts who get to go into the restricted area can operate these machines. Unmanned aircraft are going to be like PC’s, so cheap and easy to use that anyone can have one. The possibilities here are quite remarkable. Data collection, aerial work, cargo, and passenger transport are likely to feel the effects of this shift.
-Long haul, passenger, mass transportation will be the last segment to be effected. The first segments to be effected will be small, light-weight, short duration applications.
So what else?
I don’t really have a clear idea of how this effects incumbents. It will definitely be change. On the one hand, I think that the big guys at the top of the market will be fine. I don’t expect Boeing or the airlines to disappear. On the other hand, I don’t think that axis will have the control over aviation that they do today. They will be more like bus companies and builders in the large automotive industry.
The cult of the pilot will be diminished (as it already is in military aviation) and air travel will continue to be democratized. I believe that we are witnessing something akin to the introduction of the automobile. Prior to the automobile, mechanized transportation had been too expensive and hard to use for anyone that was not an expert. Prior to aerial automation, aircraft were too expensive and hard to use for anyone but an expert. That’s changing, if we can hurry up the FAA, we have an amazing industrial explosion ahead of us.
robocosmist 
Even the Navy Has Market Risk (they just call it something else)
2012/11/08 by Robert Morris Leave a comment
My long awaited article in Proceedings just came out! You might not have been waiting for it, but I have! I started the article over a year ago. It was a slog. I can’t quite believe that I’m now signing up to publish an academic paper on the capital structure of robotics companies.
Image Credit: DTIC
In summary, the U.S. Navy is making a terrible mistake in it unmanned maritime vehicle policy. The Navy is basically designing all their programs for robots that swim in the water to fail. The technology exists today to make really cool, useful maritime robots. However, the technology does not exist today to build the Navy’s dream robots. (Especially since the Navy’s secret dream is to need more manned ships of the type we have today.) Essentially, the Navy is pulling the equivalent of refusing to look at Roomba because it is not Rosie.
I’ll try and expand upon some of the key ideas from the paper over the next couple of weeks. Readers of this blog will be familiar with the core ideas which have been translated from business to military jargon. The Navy has to figure out what it needs its robots to do and the ecosystem around them at the same time that it is working on building the systems. That’s what we in business call market risk! The Navy needs to take some steps to reduce that risk. Although the defense acquisition process stacks the deck against the Navy and it has some truly heroic individuals working on the problem, as an institution, the Navy really isn’t putting forth an adequate showing considering we’re talking about the institution’s future.
As a patriotic citizen of the United States–and as someone who understands that the U.S. Navy as much any institution on the planet has guaranteed an era of global trade, peace, and freedom–I really want our Navy to have a bright future. Everyone who studies the naval budget–horses and bayonets snark aside–knows that the Navy isn’t on a sustainable path. Robotics offer the Navy a future even brighter than the past. To have this future, the Navy will have to learn how to manage and implement this technology. It won’t be easy, but there are solid principles for doing this.
P.S.
Also, readers, I want to thank you. Thank you for being patient with a terrible layout, a casual tone, mixed quantitative/qualitative arguments, poor citation, and irregular tables. I do want you to know that you are reading a blog whose underlying ideas are good enough to go through peer review. I, for one, commend you for that. I hope that the ideas have a practical impact in advancing robotics that improve the world. Now, stop indulging my self-congratulation and get back to putting more robots into the world!
Filed under Commentary, Policy Tagged with budget, maritime, Navy, policy, robot, robotic, shipbuilding, ships, systems development, UMV, unmanned, unmanned systems, USV, UUV