I believe that in about five years we will see the first examples of compact drones “living” autonomously on roofs in big cities, in places of comparative safety, occasionally descending to carry out certain tasks. I’m not sure, perhaps surveillance or graffiti tasks. They will be powered by solar energy, and programmed to autonomously locate a safe nesting place on roofs for recharging (solar panels). Recharging may take a considerable amount of time, but who cares about a single drone when there is a swarm working in unison. Periodically, they will be able to connect to the Internet to upload the collected data to a secure cloud storage for their owners and to receive crucial updates about their mission from the cloud. They will be able to continuously communicate with nearby drones to coordinate their actions. From a technical perspective, all necessary technologies are already available today. It’s now down to producing the first operational prototypes.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 