Nokia working with United Arab Emirates on a Drone Control System

What do you think of when you hear ‘drones’? Probably not Nokia. Sure they’ve flown drones in the past with their Nokia devices on them, but as to actually developing the drone technology itself that’s all new to me.

Nokia are working with UAE to “pave way for safe and sustainable drone operations in the country”. It seems Nokia wants to be part of the big drone craze, both in commercial and government applications. One such is a traffic management system where all of these Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV/Drones) can be tracked and managed. Together with Nokia, UAE want to be the first country to be Drone Friendly and “embrace drone technology as part of smart city operations”.

What uses of drones have you seen? The simplest are those that are just flying enthusiasts. More commonly they’re seen in the hands of video enthusiasts. I guess in the military we have the unmanned jets. Amazon was in the news for wanting to trial delivery by drones. They’ve also been useful for law enforcement, search and rescue, 3D mapping, extreme precision agriculture and so much more. I saw a ‘concept’ video the other day where a ‘fleet’ of drones was used to light up a road for a car (a car that already has its own lights though :S). Speaking of a fleet of drones and lights, Intel’s light show looked mind blowing, like actual magic:

How long before they get a 1080p resolution out of these single dot drones? :p

With an explosive growth in the number of drones, what’s making sure everything runs smoothly up in the air so that these things don’t collide with each other or are used to snoop?

It needs some kind of management system on a colossal scale. But what is Nokia bringing to their UAV traffic management (UTM) concept? Well big old Nokia part is a global network leader, and it’s the network experience in developing 4G LTE, 5G, managing a network operations centre that would allow Nokia to optimise this network for UTM connectivity and integrating that into other platforms.

Here’s the link to Nokia’s press release.

Category: Nokia