New Uses for UASs (Article Review)

Over the past few years, the number of applications for Unmanned Aerospace Systems (UASs) have grown significantly. Prior to 2000, UASs were reserved for NASA and the Department of Defense. Today we are starting to see small businesses, real estate agencies, and industry turn to UAS platforms to accomplish tasks that were once done by humans, airplanes, or helicopters. Due to the decline in the cost of UASs and their components, as well as the recent changes to FAA regulations that let more agencies use them legally, there has been a burst of new uses for UASs. Beyond the big stories about how Amazon is trying to set up a UAS delivery service, there are smaller and less widely known applications for UASs that will greatly affect the public in the near future.

The insurance industry is starting to use UAS in order to accomplish many subtasks associated with the industry. These subtasks include disaster claim photography and video capture, 3D mapping of auto accidents, and in the future there could even be autonomous claim capture via UAS. All of these will not only save the insurance company time and money, but the savings will be passed to the consumer as well as also expedite the claim payment. This fast claim capture could also augment emergency response efforts and speed up emergency relief funding.

In the past, a task like disaster relief is often a difficult situation to assess due to the fact that transportation into and out of the affected area is either impossible or too dangerous to do just after a disaster. In the referenced article, the man made disaster in the Port of Tianjin, China caused a 3KM exclusion zone to be formed around the port for weeks while the government determined if the explosion caused any hazardous material to become airborne. While traditional insurance companies that utilize either manned aviation assets or people on the ground waited for the exclusion zone to open up, cutting edge insurance companies utilized UASs to get real time video and photographs of the affected area. This allows the insurance companies to estimate and pay out insurance claims much faster to the companies effected by the explosion.

Image of Port of Tianjin, China After an Explosion 

Flood damage and hurricane damage are also great examples of situations where UASs could safely and quickly assess claims faster than other manned or manual methods. Because the cost of UASs are going down and the quality of cameras are going up it has created a perfect situations for companies to start utilizing UASs. Even more recently, the FAA relaxed commercial small UAS regulations which will make using UASs by insurance companies even easier.  

    

References:

Lewis, C. (2016, July 18). The future is looking up for Insurance companies and drones. Retrieved September 08, 2016, from https://robotenomics.com/2016/07/18/the-future-is-looking-up-for-insurance-companies-and-drones/