Fascinating, the first word that comes to the mind. Drones and big data are bonding pretty well these days and can be a successful recipe for innovations. 

Jonathan Buckley, senior vice president of marketing at Qubole, gives us a glimpse of this promising combo but not without the challenges. 

Agriculture, disaster relief and anti-poaching are some area where the combination has worked wonders. Needless to say more such wonders are in pipeline. But, yes there is a ‘butt’ of challenges attached here. The data gathered by drones is immense, it will require real time big data analytics and ad-hoc analysis to improve. But, one can feel optimistic about the future.

Have a look at  http://smartdatacollective.com/jonathanbuckley/316611/growing-relationship-between-drones-and-big-data

Big data generated by drones is useful in every sector including monitoring data of animal cruelty on farms and surveillance data from military drones. The drones' usage needs a revolution in big data cloud services. However, flying a drone and taking pictures is the first step in data collection process. Since software to reason directly from video feeds is still in a research phase, drone data handling needs to be improved. The use of a cloud-based in-memory computing platform can enhance analytics, processes, and predictive capabilities. Amazon recently proposed to increase sales and revenue by providing the delivery of food using drones. By gathering data on a large scale, service providers will be able to process unique levels of details and turn it into usable information. To know more, go through Abhishek Sharma (author of InfoQ)'s article: http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/09/drone-data-big-data-analytics