Feature: Italy keen to boost use of civilian drones across the board
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E-mail Xinhua, January 23, 2016
From monitoring crops and mapping infrastructures to sampling air pollutants, the attention around the civilian uses of drones seemed to be sharply on the rise in Italy.
Major players in the domestic market of commercial drones, or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), gathered at the Rome Drone Conference on Jan. 20 to discuss the industry's future perspectives. The event offered Italian producers a good chance to display innovative UAV models that might prove relevant for different economic sectors.
One of those was agriculture.
"A key application of civilian drones is now in land monitoring, especially in so-called precision agriculture (or satellite farming)," Niccolo Marrocco from Drone Service Company told Xinhua.
"A drone can capture high resolution images of the fields, and cover vast swathes of crops in a relatively short time, thus carrying out a thorough examination of the land," he said.
"This helps detect which specific plants are affected by a disease, or which ones need more treatments, or more water."
Drones also come equipped with the necessary technology to monitor air quality. It is able to collect samples of five major pollutants: namely, carbon dioxide, methane, hydrocarbons, sulphur dioxide, and sulphuric acid.
"It sends fresh data every five seconds to the remote controller. Such technology would grant a dynamic mapping and a real-time sampling of the air," according to Angelo Fienga, the company's official speaker at the conference.
The Rome meeting was part of a series of conferences sponsored by Italy's Ministry of Environment, the Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC), the Air Traffic Management Entity (ENAV), and the main professional associations in the sector.
Italy has seen a considerable growth in the number of civil drones since 2013. ENAC updated its regulation on UAVs under 150 kg last year. A 2015 report from the authority showed there were over 1,200 authorized drones flying in Italy, and some 600 firms, mainly of small and medium size, working in the industry.
Such figures are expected to increase and the drone market will keep growing, "at least in terms of the number of companies involved," according to the president of Rome Drone Conference, Luciano Castro.
Such expectations are fuelled by both the evolution of the UAV technology and its versatility.
"The uses of a drone even within a same sector can be numerous, depending on which technology you use," Marco Barberini, project manager with Italdrone Company, told Xinhua.
"Drone with a thermal camera would be able to measure the level of heat loss in the fields, and plan irrigation schedule accordingly. We also use drones in biological treatment of crops," Barberini added.
In the infrastructure field, video monitoring of big infrastructure was among the first applications of this technology, and remains the most important one, Barberini said.
UAVs allow close inspection of hard-to-reach infrastructures and would offer a series of advantages compared to the visual control of human beings.
"This application has now reached a more advanced level, allowing 3D pictures and a 3D model of the infrastructure," he said.
A case study on such a use of UAVs was presented by Giulia Buffi, PhD researcher in Civil and Environment engineering with the universities of Perugia, Pisa, and Florence.
Her research dealt with the photogrammetric reconstruction of the Ridracoli Dam in Emilia Romagna region in northern Italy. The five-day UAV survey measured 103 meters in height and 432 meters in length.
"The use of the UAVs allowed a video inspection of the infrastructure, which means checking its current conditions and detecting possible (deteriorating) processes underway," Buffi told Xinhua.
Drones can reach big facilities in a way not possible for human beings with traditional topographic instruments, the researcher explained.
An increasing interest in drones is palpable in Italy's public sector.
Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI), the national railway network's owner, recently opened a public tender to select a UAV company and perform a "geometrical structural survey" on some of its less accessible bridges.
ENEL, Italy's state-controlled largest power company, which was routinely using drones for inspecting electricity lines and plants, is now testing them to check on transmission lines in emergency situations. Endit
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