An Overview of the Challenges to Implement Drones in the Manufacturing Industry

This paper discusses the challenges of implementing drones in manufacturing operations. Drones can be used directly to enhance manufacturing accuracy in firms as one of the current technologies of Industry 4.0. Despite several benefits, the challenges can be portrayed using the TOE framework to understand technological, organizational, and environmental challenges. All the challenges are analyzed to highlight the critical challenges that play a significant role in implementing drones in the manufacturing industry. This research finds out the following challenges as the critical ones, viz. efficiency in transferring data captured by drones, interoperability and communication with other equipment and IT systems, awareness and training of drone pilots, traffic management to stop collisions with other drones or equipment, and government regulations regarding the usage of drones in the manufacturing sector. Among the technological, organizational, and environmental dimensions, the technological dimension has been the most critical and causal for other challenging dimensions in implementing drones in manufacturing firms.