Before companies head off into the wild blue yonder, however, several things have to happen. The federal government needs to figure out how to regulate the commercial use of drones. Drone vendors need to figure out their business models. And corporate users need to figure out how drones will fit into their IT operations.

Today, the market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a.k.a. drones, is dominated by defense applications like the multimillion-dollar Predator. However, ABI Research predicts the commercial market for small UAVs will grow from an estimated $652m in 2014 to more than $5.1bn by 2019, becoming twice as large as the military/civil defense market, says Dan Kara, practice director of robotics at the market research company.

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