How Drones Can Help Fight the Coronavirus

Public health measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have introduced “social distancing” into the national lexicon. Drone companies believe they can help. Drone technology is ready to break out into a mass service and reduce person-to-person contact. There are a few dozen pilot programs throughout the United States and some limited commercial deployments for services such as medical delivery, parcel delivery, utilities inspection, and crop spraying. These programs have shown drones to be technically feasible for the set of tasks tested, and some of them have even tested business models with a measure of success. A crisis like the current pandemic has a way of focusing the minds of regulators on key questions—in this case, can the use of drones be scaled up?