At Novus Altair, our research and development team continue to invest in key technologies, basic engineering capabilities, network architecture, technical standards, and product development. We aim to create a better and connected experience using the latest technology combined with the capabilities of robotics.

In the market, there continues to be a lot of debates surrounding the opportunities to use drone technology on manned guarding assignments – imaging working with a drone that travels around the perimeter and reports back to you. However, despite being identified by experts as one of the security industry’s top innovations, very few companies are using drones at the present.

In this article, we look at the reasons why the usage of drones has not been implemented by all security firms.
 

Battery Life
At the moment, battery life is known to be one of the major issue/limitation with drones. Since the propellers use a lot of power and batteries are heaving, meaning flight time is greatly reduced. Typically, a drone can last up to 25 minutes on a full charge.
 

Cost Prohibitive
When drones were first introduced, a single unit would cost around £250 (and over). However, the problem isn’t the cost but the quantities required to effectively resource the operation.

For instance, a drone could potentially be a very effective tool when assisting in external patrols and the battery-life issue could be circumvented by a rotating fleet od drones. This would be expensive, and in addition there would still be the cost of the Security Officer involved.
 

Conclusion
Drones can be used to complement the security industry in several ways, but the challenge lies in identifying the best way to use them in-order to support the manned guarding assignment. Although there is one possible resolution which involves having a larger fleet of drones, however, this obviously increases costs.

Since the biggest challenge with drones is the battery life. This still remains as the biggest challenge that engineers have been unable to resolve. However, we strongly believe in the future, engineers will somehow find a way to tackle the battery issue.

To learn about our Research and Developments, please visit our Research and Development page.