As the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) continues to take steps to ease restrictions on commercial drone use, State Farm and Amazon have become the most recent household names permitted to test unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).
State Farm, the first insurer to be granted an exemption from the current ban on the commercial use of a UAS was allowed to use the vehicles for outdoor research and development, including using imagery and analytics in underwriting, re-underwriting, catastrophe response, roof inspection, and claim resolutions settings. Ultimately one of the most important uses State Farm and other insurers would have for these vehicles may be in evaluating property damage from and responding to natural disasters.
In the retail industry, Amazon made a big splash in 2013 when it announced its Prime Air program and interest in developing UAS technology with the goal of delivering packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using small unmanned aerial vehicles. The FAA issued Amazon Logistics, Inc., an experimental airworthiness certificate to an unmanned aircraft (UAS) design that the company will use for research and development and crew training.
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