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V O L . X X I V N O. I V F E B R UA R Y 1 9 , 2 0 1 8 14 T he "bomb cyclone" that hit the Northeast last October resulted in tens of thou- sands of power outages. Coutts Brothers, in Randolph, was commissioned by utilities to deploy unmanned aerial systems, commonly called drones (and also unmanned aerial vehicles), with thermal sensors to locate power line problems due to issues like fallen trees or broken poles. It was a fast and easy way to send out eyes in the sky to quickly monitor the situation. "We did that a few nights, starting at the beginning of the storm, so that the work orders could be ready the next morning and the crews could get to where they needed to be," says Coutts Brothers General Manager Brad Stout. e use of drones for commer- cial applications, like the utility line inspection example above, has steadily grown in Maine. ey're acclaimed as being faster, easier, safer and cheaper in many situations than deploying humans, as well as being able to maneuver in tight spaces and provide bird's eye views that can oth- erwise be more costly or dangerous to obtain than, say, sending a person up in a helicopter or climbing a tele- phone pole. And they can carry all manner of equipment, like cameras and heat sensors, which communicate the view in a variety of ways. A booming market ere are rotary drones and fixed-wing drones that can be programmed to fly autonomously or be piloted either by a remote controller or an app. ey can be programmed to avoid obstacles, adjust camera settings on the fly, pro- vide first-person viewing capability and capture location information on-the- go through GPS units. ere are three main segments of the drone market: consumer-hobbyist; commercial and government, includ- ing military and public safety. Goldman Sachs forecasts busi- nesses and civil governments will spend $13 billion on drones between 2017 and 2020. ere are more than 44,000 com- mercial drones, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which started requiring registration as of April 2016. e FAA expects 10 times that number by 2021. "e military has been using drone technology for a long time, but it's not necessarily been widely known," says Patrick Cunningham, CEO of Blue Marble Geographics, in Hallowell, a mapping software company that recently introduced Pixels-to-Points, specifically aimed at drone use by transforming drone-collected images into 3D representations. "But it started to become a more common commer- cial tool. And it's definitely grown." Many uses Drones are gaining a foothold in construction, real estate, agriculture, mining, energy, film production, law enforcement, search and rescue, GIS mapping and more. At Fluent IMC, a Westbrook integrated marketing communications firm founded by Marnie Grumbach, partner Peter Anania last year obtained F O C U S Brad Stout, president and CEO of Coutts Brothers, in the drone lab in Randolph with a DJI drone that the company uses for thermal and visual inspections of power lines. P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Commercial drone use is taking off in Maine B y L a u r i e S c h r e i b e r

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