The way number of drones are growing everywhere, it is important for stakeholders to track the actual flying locations of drones. Drone live tracking is much needed for everyone. Here are some of the important reasons it is needed for.

1. It is important to ensure that drone flies in the virtual permitted geo-fence only for security reasons. Therefore, live tracking of drone for virtual geo-fence compliance is required so that require action can be taken immediately if compliance is not followed. And certainly, this is matter of national security for any country.
2. Drone Operation Managers always want to understand the actual usage of his fleet of drones. He would like to understand where his drones are flying and for what reason. So that he can do optimal usage of his drones.
3. Performance analytics of drones is vital for drone operation managers and manufacturers. They would always want to see actual planned geo-coordinates vs actual flight coordinates and then improve the performance if there is any deviation.
4. Understanding total hours of flying for any drone is must for operators and manufacturers from timely maintenance perspective. This requires tracking and storing of flight logs for further analytics.
5. Security authorities would always want to check how many drones are flying in a area and who are the owners or operators of the those drones.
6. Tracking of drones would also be required for avoidance of possible collision in a particular area so that while flight planning itself, possibility of collision can be avoided.
7. Tracking of drone would be required by the end user to understand location of his parcel in case of drone deliveries.  This will help consumer to plan his further activities according to estimated time of delivery. User would expect to track the drone on his mobile application

Drone Live Tracking requires the drone to send its geo-location coordinates continuously to a server farm which can be part of cloud infrastructure. The receiving servers requires to be massively scalable system so that it can handle the continuous load of incoming drone data and use that data to plot flying drone path on geo-map. Technically, drone live tracking can be implemented in following two ways.

1. Position Sender (Drone) and then Receiver (Cloud Servers)
2. Position Sender (Drone), and Receiver plus Re-Sender (GCS Software) then Final Receiver (Cloud Servers)

The first technical implementation would be required in case of BVLOS drones where drones would be directly controlled through web-based drone management software like AeroMegh Platform and pilot is away from the drone. In such case, drone has a software client running on top the drone and communicating with the cloud system using internet network. This kind of drone deployment does not require any hardware to track live position of drone.

In Second use case, drone sends its geo-position directly to GCS software which is managed by pilot. The GCS software receives the live geo-coordinates from drone and retransmits those live geo-coordinates continuously to receiving cloud servers.  Therefore, this type of deployment also does not require any extra hardware to track live position of the drone. Some GCS software like AeroGCS have got such functionality to receive geo-coordinates and re-transmit to cloud servers.  Certainly, GCS terminal should have internet connectivity to connect to cloud servers and send drone geo-locations.

So, in nutshell, if you want to track live position of your drones, you really don’t need any extra hardware to be mounted on your drone. Additional weight on drone always reduce your flight time, every gram matters lot.  What you need is right solution like AeroGCS software or AeroMegh platform to enable drone live tracking.