How 5G can enable drones to perform key tasks

Given the high cost of manual surveillance, drones could cut costs dramatically by providing a flexible and efficient means of surveying large areas and detecting problems. Telefónica estimates drones could be up to 15 times more efficient than a fixed camera, while also speeding up response times 80-fold in unattended environments.

Telefónica says its connected drones are attracting interest from analytical companies, sports clubs, the military and police. “When we make the business case, our focus is for the security, but we know that the drones can be used for more than this aspect,” says Miguel Álvaro Fernández “Every day, we note new functionalities that the drone service can do, as customers suggest more functionalities that we don’t have in our road map.”

By locating the computational power required for image recognition at the edge of the network, Unmanned Life is able to reduce the weight of the drone and increase flight times. The longer each surveillance mission, the greater the overall efficiency. Using computing power at the edge, rather than in the cloud, also delivers the low latency required to ensure the analytics are presented in real-time.

Unmanned Life also uses the edge compute to perform the real-time calculations required to enable a swarm of drones to fly autonomously. With a low latency connection, the drones are able to react rapidly to any change in the circumstances.

The trials harnessed both on-site edge devices and the public network telco edge. As the solution is deployed commercially, Telefónica plans to use the public network telco edge capabilities within its 5G network to support the drones. That means it can offer the whole solution as a service, rather than a project or a product.

“For example, if we want to deploy the system in Bilbao or another city in Spain, we don’t need to go there with our server to deploy all the system,” explains Miguel Álvaro. “We only need to deploy the service in an existing edge facility.” However, Telefónica recognises that some customers, such as the military, may prefer to use private computing facilities.

Unmanned Life’s platform is designed to be hardware-agnostic, so it can support a wide range of drones, including models with rotors and fixed-wing aircraft with a much longer flight time. When the battery of one drone is running low, the platform automatically replaces it with a fully-charged model.

The capacity of 5G means “we can increase the throughput for the video, if we want,” as well as using multiple drones, explains Miguel Álvaro. Although “we are able to control the drone and video with 4G technology, if we want to control a swarm of drones, 5G is important.”

As well as providing faster, more responsive connectivity, the 5G public network makes it easier to scale the solution. Where cellular coverage is already in place, connected drones can be configured quickly using dedicated access point names (APN).

Telefónica’s trials of drone technology are yielding some important insights as to how 5G deployments could evolve to support drones. It has found that existing cellular networks, which have been optimised to support land-based devices, such as smartphones, won’t necessarily perform as well when serving airborne devices, such as drones.

“We need to be very careful with the protocols that we use to, for instance, to stream video to the edge in order to recognise images,” says David Moro, head of services platform in Telefónica CTIO. “In the upcoming years, we know that drones are going to be increasing in number. So, we need to start thinking about how to optimise for the needs of this specific kind of end user, the specific terminals that we are going to have.”

Working with Unmanned Life, Telefónica is already optimising the way in which videos are transmitted. Although forthcoming iterations of the 5G standard will incorporate specific features to support drones, telcos will also need to consider how to support airborne connections when planning their coverage. “We are now going to have devices or terminals that are flying at 60 metres when this is not normally the case,” says David Moro. “It’s a way of thinking. In the past, the planners of the access network didn’t traditionally think about having to support drones. But this is something we need to take into consideration for the following years and it’s a very important insight.”

As their numbers rise, drones will need to communicate with air traffic systems. In this respect, customised 5G connectivity is set to play a key role in enabling individual drones to connect directly with UAM (urban air mobility) systems and with each other. Through this low latency, managed connectivity, the drones will be able to communicate their coordinates, their altitude, their direction of travel and speed in real-time. “Now that we are enabling swarms of drones, all of them need to be coordinated to avoid risk,” notes Kim Clement.