Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/885126
EquipmentWorld.com | October 2017 33 "DATA IS THE NEW OIL" The words flashed upon the large screen in giant letters above Intel CEO Brian Krzanich's head shortly after he took the stage at the Inter- national Drone Conference and Ex- position (InterDrone) in Las Vegas in September. The phrase is integral for under- standing not only Intel's new role as a drone company, but also why construction companies should care. Though Krzanich's behemoth company has built its name on microprocessors, the tiny silicon chips that act as the brains of our personal computers, he wasn't at the conference to talk about processors. Rather, Krzanich's keynote address focused on the introduction of the Intel Insight Platform for drones. The new cloud-based platform is designed to harness the flood of data drones can produce and help industrial users, like those in con- struction, make sense of it all. "If you go back to the turn of the century, oil was transforming every industry.…The combustion engine turned oil into something even more productive," Krzanich said. "But when oil was discovered it was actually thought of as a nuisance material. People didn't know what to do with it." Data – though capable of provid- ing "insights and opportunities to everyone who wants to understand what's going on around them," as Krzanich put it – went through a similar nuisance stage as early memory systems struggled to pro- vide enough space for storing all the data being created. But now, Krzanich says, data has found its combustion engine. "Artificial intelligence (AI) is extracting insights and understand- ing and value out of data, and it's become one of the most valuable commodities," he said. Krzanich added that when you bring drones together with data and AI, "the whole world will begin to change." "The future of drones is more about what you can do with that data and what that data means and the insights it provides than the actual flight itself. And that's an important shift that we all need to start thinking about," he said. Like spell check for inspections Krzanich then demonstrated the capabilities of the Insight Platform by doing a structural inspection in the conference hall. A curtain on the left side of the stage was pulled and out of the black appeared the two-story facade of a building with windows, doorways, awnings, wall- mounted flagpoles. He talked about how Intel's lat- est commercial eight-rotor drone, the Falcon 8+, features Real Sense technology, which uses cameras and depth-of-field sensing to avoid obstacles and keep a safe distance from the surface being inspected. The drone also has an impressive indoor location technology onboard that provides location data when GPS cannot be used. Krzanich oversaw a piloted inspection of the facade and a second inspection flown autonomously that technology | staff report Intel Insight drone data analysis platform detects changes between inspections The Intel Falcon 8+ System is outfitted for industrial inspection, surveying and mapping. Photo Credit: Intel