Fixed-wing or rotary drones best?

Drone hardware sales along will contribute US$8.9 billion by 2031, with the entire drone market worth more than US$22b by 2041.

So says IDTechEx’s report Drone Market and Industries 2021-2041 which explains drones are a key market that impacts many different aspects of industry and commercial use cases.

The report covers the hardware, software, sensors, and use cases for this key industry.

Drone companies typically fall into one of two categories – fixed-wing or rotary drones which have different use cases.

Fixed-wing drones require a take-off and landing zone and are used in long-distance flights as they have longer flight times.

Rotary drones are used in cases where more manoeuvrability is required, such as for inspection of infrastructure.

These are typically more efficient for smaller drone sizes due to their design. With four fixed-pitch props, there are few moving parts, and this reduces the cost of the drone. However, this design does not scale up very well.

Quadcopters require stabilisation for each of their motors to fly. For the drone to stay stable in the air, it needs to individually adjust the thrust in each of its props.

As a quadcopter requires its motors to speed up or slow down to adjust the thrust, there needs to be a built-in time delay to how fast the drone can react, as it takes time to change the speed of the prop due to its inertia.

So scaling the drone up to a larger size does not work because the larger the propeller, the more energy it takes to change its speed. This either needs a drastic oversize of each motor which would increase the weight, or have a slow dynamic response, which would impact handling, IDTechEx explains.

Its report analyses and compares the key trends and changes over the next two decades.

The drone market has continued to see growth throughout 2019 and 2020 – which includes the COVID-19 pandemic, according to IDTechEx analysis.

“This is due to the vast range of use cases which drones can be used for, and their continued benefit to collect detailed data and mapping of areas which are difficult to cover by humans.”