Source: press.3dr.com

3D Robotics unveiled sweeping changes by closing its San Diego facility, reducing staff at its Berkeley headquarters and in Austin, TX, and acknowledging that co-founder and president Jordi Muñoz left the company at the end of 2015.

The latest staff reductions follow more extensive layoffs that took place at the end of 2015, after 3DR shifted its manufacturing operations from Tijuana to Shenzhen to economically mass produce their new Solo quadcopter which was intended to compete with DJI’s Phantom line of quadcopters.

In an interview with Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow, Anderson described the changes as something that was part of 3DR’s plan all along.

This is a consolidation we’ve been working on since before October of last year. As we shifted from the DIY era to consumer and to enterprise customers, we ended up with a different organization each time.

Anderson omitted talking about the problems 3DR faced with their Solo drone. The Solo started off with a flashy launch video that introduced the product about a year ago. DJI, at about the same time, released their new Phantom 3 with a list of features that surpassed the Solo. Because of producing and warehousing drones in China, 3DR made too many Solos particularly given how fast competitors were dropping prices and flooding the market. They built up a massive and costly inventory. A fully equipped Solo was priced too high for the market. 3DR was forced to lower prices to just $799 plus $199 for the gimbaedl platform, down from the initial price of $1,000 and $400. Keeping up the pressure, DJI cut its Phantom 3 prices ahead of its launch of the Phantom 4, a smarter and more sensor-laden drone all inclusively priced at $1,399.

In another interview with MarketWatch, Anderson said that 3DR was moving to the commercial market due to heavy competition in the consumer drone marketplace.

DJI is doing great, it’s because they are moving so fast, it’s forcing the others to adapt. Some companies are adapting by leaving, and others are adapting by moving upstream to the enterprise, which was always our plan. And [that move] is just accelerating right now.

3DR will now be focusing more narrowly on enterprise customers that are interested in using drones for such projects as utility line and pipeline inspections, and construction site inspections. As part of that move, 3DR announced the release of its Site Scan aerial analytics platform earlier this month. The technology enables corporate customers to conduct inspections and scan work sites with the Solo smart drone, and transmit the data to the cloud for processing and analytics. The system has a software-as-a-service monthly subscription model, which integrates Autodesk software, where using the 3DR Solo drone, businesses can upload aerial images, analytics and other data to the 3DR cloud. The system uses a tablet from Sony, a GoPro camera and starts at $3,249 for the hardware.

​Anderson remains CEO, and Jeevan Kalanithi, 3DR’s chief product officer, becomes president. 3DR had ramped up to more than 350 employees but, with the current layoffs, will be down to below 80. The company’s former president, co-founder Jordi Muñoz, left the company last year as part of the ramping down of 3DR’s operations in San Diego and Tijuana.

“By making job cuts and refocusing, 3DR currently has enough financial runway until the second quarter of 2017 without having to go back to investors,” Anderson said. “We want to make sure we have a good long year of runway,” he said. “You don’t want to have to go back to the market every six months. This is a moment when the investors want to see a profitable, lean operation, and we are doing that.”

image: InterDrone

Intel Capital invested $60m in Chinese drone startup Yuneec last month. At last week’s InterDrone conference and expo, one can readily see why: lots of interest, lots of people, and products that are becoming commodities.

Intel and Yuneec will work on developing future products. Yuneec makes drones for consumers and industrial users, as well as manned electric aircraft. Intel has also invested in drone companies Airware and PrecisionHawk. These drone relationships fit with Intel’s strategy to make investments in companies developing products with the potential to expand the market for semiconductors, as the company searches for new devices for chips.

Hong Kong-based Yuneec Electric Aviation is one of the Big 3 of drone manufacturers exhibiting at this week’s InterDrone International Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas. The other two being SZ DJI Innovations and 3D Robotics. Yuneec and DJI are Chinese companies; 3D Robotics is San Diego based. DJI recently received $75m from Silicon Valley VC, Accel Partners. 3D Robotics got $64m so far this year. A study of the 700+ FAA exemptions for commercial drone use shows that the overwhelming majority of them are for companies using DJI quadcopters.

Sixty million dollars for Yuneek, $75m to DJI and $64m to 3D Robotics adds up to a lot of money and interest.

That interest was apparent at the InterDrone event at the Rio Convention Center in Las Vegas. It was the first such event for InterDrone, yet from my walk around the show and attendance at a few of the packed conference sessions, it seemed to be successful. 99 exhibitors and over 3,000 visitors. I heard the latter group asking very cogent questions about how drones’ capabilities, their data and mapping software could be used for various applications. The appeared to be a high number of foreign visitors (as can be seen on the pin-board map.)

Another observation from the show was the number of secondary exhibitors: GoPro and GoPro accessories, makers of carrying cases, lenses, sensors, mapping software, retail stores carrying multiple lines of drones, cameras and cases. Samy’s Camera, a large West Coast camera and printer provider, was showing off the fact that they’ve been selling all brands of drones for photographic purposes for years.

BOTTOM LINE: The commercial drone industry is maturing in a similar way to industrial robots: a few major manufacturers are providing their arms (drones) to thousands of integrators, resellers and value-added service providers, which extend the sales reach of the drone (robot) manufacturers.

CyPhy Works raises 230K in first two days of the crowdfunding campaign for their new autopilot drone, LVL 1.

Competition is fierce in the world of consumer drones these days, especially among companies marketing products than can produce pro quality video and photography without having to hire a drone operator or a camera person.

April saw the launch of new Phantom UAVs with suped up cameras from DJI as well as the Solo drone by 3D Robotics, whose products will be available on the shelves at 400 locations of retailer Best Buy starting in May.

Also just launched is a new Kickstarter campaign by CyPhy works for their new LVL 1 drone, which they hope will have you filming “right out of the box”. Launched only two days ago, the campaign has already reached more than 90% of its ambitious $250K goal. All 200 early bird packages are sold already, and are slated to ship in February 2016 (unfortunately just a bit too late for holiday shopping). The crack team at CyPhy is lead by Helen Greiner, who co-founded iRobot with Rodney Brooks and Colin Angle, and co-designed the first version of the Roomba.

Aerial photography simplified

The idea behind LVL1 is clever and simple. The norm on multicopters is to have the propeller discs on the same plane. This simplifies construction and dynamics, but in order to move sideways a multicopter must apply differential thrust and tilt its thrust vector (and body), and so most have a lateral thrust component. Keep in mind that a small UAV must make micro corrections continuously just to stay in the same place. This is very troublesome for aerial photography, and especially videography: the image will be jittery unless an expensive gimbal is used to counteract this motion. Otherwise the brushless motors and very high disc loading of most multicopters make up for a very stable platform.

CyPhy bypasses this problem by placing each rotor of its hexacopter in a different plane. Each rotor creates a thrust vector with a lateral component; by applying the same thrust across all the rotors, each lateral vector counteracts the others. Altering the thrust distribution between two sets produces the same vertical component (thus retaining the same altitude), but disrupts the balance of the lateral vectors. The result is lateral thrust without tilting the aircraft. The difference is obvious in the following animated GIF:

The trade-offs to this system are a slightly lower efficiency and the need for more advanced control algorithms.

Other systems have used a different approach to solve the problem, with the DJI Inspire being the most obvious. With the Inspire, rotors are on intersecting planes, but this introduces only a slight instability that counteracts the very low center of gravity when the rotors are raised (similar to the anhedral angle on high mounted wings of airplanes).

DJI Inspire

In their newest report on drones, Texas research firm Markets and Markets, projects that the global commercial drones market will grow to $1.27 billion by 2020. Andra Keay, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, expects that the gradual lifting of regulatory roadblocks to commercialization in the US will see the market for drones expand significantly.

“The ability to film from the air is incredibly useful in a wide range of industries, from utilities and agriculture to forestry and mining. But I’m very excited about the potential new technology users out there,” says Keay. “In the near future, we’ll think nothing of every realtor, maintenance or yard crew lifting a drone out of their trunk to get photos of your roof, your gutters or trees. We’ll know that robots are mainstream when a drone is just an accessory for your smartphone.”

Following a Kubrick’s 2001 lookalike teaser video, 3D Robotics (3DR) presented their most ambitious product yet, ‘SOLO’ – an advanced quadcopter that above all focuses on ease of use and hassle-free operation, along with some quite unique features.

The first thing you will notice is that Solo has a very elegant design. On par with the competition from DJI (the current market leader) and Parrot, Solo was designed by Astro Studios, a well-established industrial design agency, and is far more polished than Iris, the first 3DR consumer-friendly drone.

Solo has all the features one can expect from a very advanced camera drone. It uses 3DR’s Pixhawk2 autopilot along with a separate second linux mission computer and a dedicated controller that can host a smartphone or tablet. The gimbal (sold separately) can not only accommodate a GoPro camera (also sold separately), but for the first time the controller and its software can control the camera through the software (in a similar fashion to the GoPro app but this time integrated on 3DR’s software).

As stated from 3DR the goal is to forget about flying the drone and just manipulate the camera while the autopilot takes care of the rest.

You can take a look at Solo’s functions on the official video below or from 3Drobotics website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP3Dgr9S4pM

It is worth noticing that, for the first time, 3DR is outsourcing the manufacturing to China, a move that possibly underlines their sales plans (they continue to use their own factories for the production of the rest of their product range). Solo is slightly more expensive than its direct competitors (like Phantom 3), but if you take into account the actual features, specs and equipment, the pricing is really close.

You can read the following articles for more details, some hands-on experience from the actual product and more.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/13/8394359/3d-robotics-solo-drone-quadcopter-gopro
http://gizmodo.com/3drs-new-solo-drone-promises-airborne-footage-without-a-1697427874
http://www.bidnessetc.com/39699-best-buy-co-will-sport-smart-drones-by-3d-robotics/

A video feature from Verge :

3D Robotics has unveiled DroneKit, an open-source development kit for app development. This is a clear invite for the wider development community to build upon 3DR’s flight control software.

The SDK and web API allow developers to build apps for the air, ground or cloud. Exciting times for anyone who is a 3DR customer. 3DR’s main competitor DJI also has a development kit available for the developer community.

Benefits of becoming a 3DR developer include:

• UNIVERSAL PLATFORM – Develop your drone apps for Android, laptops, embedded computers and web.
• ROBUST AND POWERFUL – DroneKit builds on the work of thousands of contributors and years of R&D.
• VEHICLE AGNOSTIC – DroneKit works with copters, planes, rovers and even blimps!
• FREE AND OPEN – No contracts to sign, no hoops to jump through. DroneKit is available to all.
• EASY TO USE – Set up and take control of your drone in minutes, not days.
• EXTENSIBLE – DroneKit can be extended to handle additional sensors and actuators.

DroneKit features include:

• Fly paths with waypoints
• Fly in spline path with fine grain control over vehicle velocity and position
• Have the drone follow a GPS target
• Control the camera and gimbal with regions of interest points
• Access full telemetry from the drone over 3DR Radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or over the internet
• View playbacks and log analysis of any mission

DroneKit powers the most successful flight control programs in the world:

• Tower (formerly Droidplanner), hands-down the best flight planning mobile app out there, was built on DroneKit for Android
• Droneshare, the global social network for drone pilots, is built on DroneKit web services
• Project Tango Indoor Navigation is built on Pixhawk, APM and Tower
• IMSI/Design TurboSite aerial reporting app for construction

You can visit the dedicated website at DroneKit.

February was another big month for investments in robotic startup companies, including 3D Robotics, Flyability, Fetch Robotics, EHang and many others.

Equity and crowd fundings:

• 3D Robotics raised $50M in a Series C round bringing total investment to date of $85M. Qualcomm was the principle investor in this round and 3DR intends to use the funds to expand R&D and begin using Snapdragon processors and Qualcomm sensors.
• Fetch Robotics gets $3M to bring their new mobile manipulator to market and to hire up to 10 positions in addition to their present 10-member team. Fetch intends to display a research edition of their new robot at ICRA in May in Seattle.
• RoboCV, a Russian startup and developer of a range of autopilot vehicle products, got $3 to scale up activities for robotizing mobile vehicles (forklifts, warehouse and mine tugs and tows) with vision, navigation and collision avoidance systems.
• Flyability wins $1M award in a UAE-sponsored contest entitled ‘Drones for Good.’ The same organization has set up a new contest: ‘Robotics for Good.’ The goal is to encourage robotics innovation that benefits society in the areas of education, healthcare and social services. Two prizes will be given: a national prize worth 1M AED, and an international prize worth $1M USD.
• Ehang Ghost Drone gets $10M funding and $857,851 from IndieGoGo. The $10M Series A round actually happened on December 30, 2014 but it wasn’t widely publicized. They also received $858k from their IndieGoGo campaign, which concluded mid January.
• Sight Machine raised $5M to help manufacturers use advanced technology to get a handle on their data, particularly small datasets which are generally characterized as data describing what tracked objects are doing, e.g.: does the soil have the right mixture of nutrients or what is that mobile robot seeing?
• Somabar got $312,717 from a Kickstarter campaign for their stylish wifi-enabled cocktail maker and app.
• iCamPRO got $250,000 from an IndieGoGo campaign for their omnidirectional security camera with motion detectivation and follow capability. iCamPRO is a brand of Amaryllo Intl, an Amsterdam-based Dutch consumer and security products provider.

Not really an equity funding, but a fund for equity investing, Bolt, a Boston-based hardware accellerator and venture capital firm, completed funding of an investment fund of $25M to enable investing in new ventures bringing complex connected hardware products to market, some of which are robotic. Bolt established a new San Francisco facility (they share with Autodesk Pier 9 Workshop) and plan to to focus on SV startups and invest up to $500k per startup.

Acquisitions:

Perceptron continues its acquisition spree by purchasing Coord 3 for approximately $15 million. Coord 3 is an Italian provider of metrology equipment and has a line of measurement robots. Perceptron develops, produces, and sells 3D machine vision solutions for measurement, inspection, and robot guidance in industrial applications.

Failures:

And finally, Intuitive Automata and their little diet robot Autom ran out of money and failed. CEO and founder Cory Kidd has moved on to another San Francisco-based startup: Catalia Health.

The company plans to use the funding to expand their software and hardware products and intends to work with Qualcomm to further utilize that company’s Snapdragon processors, a platform designed for use with tablets and smartphones.

Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon processors, including sensors, wireless and computer vision, are considered to be ideal for developing advanced applications and driving increased performance for 3DR drones.

“By working with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., we can bring advanced computing to the skies at an increasing pace,” said Chris Anderson, CEO of 3DR. “Such multi-gigahertz Linux-based onboard computing platforms, combined with state-of-the-art cameras and other sensors and wireless technologies, will allow us to create next-gen drones that are smarter, easier and safer than ever before.”

The recent FAA-suggested regulations of the airspace, and the opening up of that space to commercial ventures, will expand 3DRs role in that emerging set of industries. With Qualcomm as a significant investor, 3DR becomes privy to smartphone technology and sensors that can help 3DR speed up research and development for the drone world.

3D Robotics, the largest drone manufacturer in the United States, has announced its latest version of the Flight Controller App ‘Tower’ to the open-source community. Tower acts as a powerful ground control station to command any 3DR-powered drone. Tower is only available on Android at the moment, and forms the latest iteration of DroidPlanner. 

Developers are invited to build new features into Tower or customize existing ones. 3DR will be the major contributor to the software, and will supply support for every issue and fix all critical concerns.

This is what 3D Robotics Chief Revenue Officer, Colin Guinn, had to say:

“3D Robotics is a big believer in imaginative uses of drones for business and pleasure, as well as in ways that benefit society. By opening up our Tower programming interface to the public, we’re giving enthusiasts and entrepreneurs the ability to impact those uses in a very positive manner, we’re excited to see how people use their talents to improve and innovate on Tower.”

Tower features:

• Transmitter-free control: You can fly your 3DR drone with just a phone or tablet.
• Create flights by drawing the paths on your tablet or dropping waypoints.
• Because 3DR gives you over 10 different waypoint types to choose from, you can create flights that suit your specific purpose.
• Fly in smooth curves with spline waypoints.
• Circle waypoints allow you to orbit an object and keep the camera pointed at it.
• Region of Interest (ROI) points allow you to keep the camera centered on a subject regardless of the path you’re flying.
• “Survey” will automatically generate the flight pattern you need to fully cover a region of the map.
• 3PV Follow Me keeps the camera centered on you while the copter follows you as you move. You can also adjust the copter’s position while it’s following you.
• Easily make 3D scans of large structures with our automated building mapper.
• The one-button Dronie lets you quickly capture a one-of-a-kind selfie that reveals the scenery around you as the copter flies up and back.
• Adjust parameters within your flight controller to get a custom feel.
• Supports both copters and planes.

Owners of a 3DR product can download the app on the Google Play Store.

The open-source community are invited to learn more and contribute on Github. You can also find more information on the project at OpenHub.

The IROS 2014 Industry Forum brought together entrepreneurs, researchers, venture capitalists and funding agencies from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia to shed perspective on the above questions and engage in open dialogue about some of the pitfalls of commercializing robotics technology. Here are the 10 best quotes from the event …

1. “Testing nothing and testing everything are equally lazy.”
– Ryan Gariepy, Clearpath Robotics

Gariepy refers to the extremes some startups take before launching a new product. He instead suggests evaluating the technologies, processes and people that can be reused efficiently, then taking a decisive step to engage your customer.

2. “Competition is not other companies or technologies, it’s the status quo.”
– Ryan Gariepy, Clearpath Robotics

Academics, consumed with dissecting the research of predecessors, colleagues and other institutions, then publishing novel work, naturally look to see what others of doing in the field to gauge their own progress. To academics looking to commercialize research, Gariepy says it’s important to know what’s out there but also to run your own race. When launching a new product, you need to focus on market first, then technology.

3. “Cheaply eliminate bad business models fast.” 
– Lee Redden, Blue River Technology

Before building their first product, Redden and team hired five part-time interns to talk with potential customers, and eliminated five poor business models in less than a month.  CarrotBot, a weeder for carrot farms, came about after talking with an IT procurement manager at a carrot farm who had struggled with finding the right technology for their particular problem. Redden also notes that if you want honest feedback from potential customers, make them feel comfortable by sharing the flaws of your product upfront and don’t show up with a perfect prototype – most people are hard-wired to protect the feelings of those they interact with, so you have to disarm them to get honest answers. “Cheaply eliminate bad business models fast.” – Lee Redden, Blue River Technology 

4. “Sometimes what the company wants and what the community wants are not perfectly aligned.”  
– Brandon Basso, 3D Robotics

Balancing of the vision of the company with the wants of an open-source community can be tricky. The 3D Robotics (3DR) community wants breadth – more hardware, sensor and platform support – whereas the company wants depth to support the community while developing native system apps and more hardware solutions. Challenges arise when a growing company has to execute on set product and revenue objectives defined by management (and in 3DR’s case, venture capital stakeholders) while integrating the community’s feedback into their product suite. Long-term, this relationship creates a virtuous cycle. The community provides 3DR with an on-demand workforce, tech support via developer list, rapid exploration of new opportunities and a huge beta test group. 3DR gives back to the community through cheaper and faster hardware, expertise, capital, support and worldwide distribution.

5. “The robot revolution will be an evolution.”
– Christopher Parlitz, SCHUNK

According to Parlitz, the integration of components is the new challenge in robotics. Without standards in place for mechanical and electrical components or transfer of data, creating intelligent systems will take time. He talks of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and ROS as two solutions for integrating hardware components, each with its list of pros and cons. As new integrated intelligent solutions start working robustly, they will no longer be considered “robots”, making the progression much more of an evolution than a revolution. “The robot revolution will be an evolution.” – Christopher Parlitz, @SCHUNKInc 

6. “If I lose control of my startup, my invention won’t wind up at a fire sale.” 
– Michael Peshkin, Northwestern University

IP. IP. IP. Intellectual property dominated this year’s industry discussion. Each university’s tech transfer office has its own rules – some grant both faculty and student inventors full ownership, others to students but not to faculty, and then there are jointly-owned inventions between university and industry (Renaud Champion, a venture capital partner at Robolution warns researchers against these). Emotions and the perceived value of owning intellectual property can often outweigh its real monetary and practical benefits. Peshkin speaks to this point and outlines six key reasons why he prefers Northwestern University’s technology transfer office to own his patents:

• They pay the expenses, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars
• If they don’t want to pay, they unambiguously turn the rights over
• Future investors shouldn’t worry about IP ownership
• They take a reasonable percent of royalties and/or equity
• They won’t ever sell a patent
• “If I lose control of my startup, my invention won’t end up at a fire sale” – Michael Peshkin, Northwestern University 

7. “If there are people with pitchforks at your door, you’re probably doing something right.” 
– Shahin Farshchi, Lux Capital

In addition to IP, regulations (or lack thereof) of certain robotics products create an uncertain environment for commercializing technology. Farshchi says focus on building a company with a clear value proposition that customers want. If regulatory bodies want to speak with you, it’s probably because you’ve taken enough market share to draw attention. And as a first mover, you’ll more likely have the opportunity to shape regulation which will put you in a favorable position going forward.

8. “Good research doesn’t necessarily mean a good product.”
– Ayanna Howard, Zyrobotics

People buy things that are useful to them and shifting focus from product specs to selling a value proposition can stumble some researchers. That’s why Howard says it’s important to be self-aware and know when it’s time to bring in outside expertise. She sees the quality of management as being just as important – if not more important – than the technology itself.

9. “If I have competition, there’s a market, if there’s a market, there’s an industry, and if there’s an industry, there’s liquidity.”
– Renaud Champion, Robolution Capital

Competition is not always a good thing, but in a nascent market for robotics products, it can be great. Competition means there’s enough market demand for several products to compete with one another and from a venture capitalist’s point of view that means there’s room for growth and potential exit opportunities.

10. “I have a dream. I have a vision. Why not me?” 
– Renaud Champion, Robolution Capital

At some point, starting a new business takes a leap of faith. Dreams can take a long time to manifest. Finding the right (or sometimes good-enough) answers to build a solid vision, a product, a team, a brand and convince customer and investors that your product can bring value to the community is tedious and was compared to a rollercoaster ride by many of entrepreneurs at the forum.  But this process, which almost always transforms the entrepreneur (and if they’re lucky, an entire industry), often starts with a simple question: “Why not me?” “I have a dream. I have a vision. Why not me?” – Renaud Champion, Robolution Capital 

Follow all of our IROS 2014 coverage here.

In addition to contending with the FAA, the group must also gain traction with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which manages the communication frequencies that drones would use, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which will be ruling on privacy issues. With multiple government bodies to lobby, Drobac believes it makes sense to work together in a concerted effort.

According to Drobac, there was already an appetite for a coalition among those in the small UAV business, whose needs differed somewhat from the larger UAV firms with aerospace and defence contracts. “The coalition members are all extremely consumer-focused,” he said, pointing out that the first priority of the group will be to lobby for clear safety and privacy guidelines, both of which are key concerns for consumers. The coalition has already filed several petitions for exemption with the FAA, and hopes to influence and educate policymakers and consumers about the commercial opportunities of small UAVs.

Patrick Egan from sUAS News thinks this consumer focus makes the coalition’s lobbying needs distinctly different from the needs of the UAV “old guard” of Department of Defence (DoD) vendors. “Previous lobbying efforts have been working to regulate 10-year-old aviation technology,” he says, pointing out that, by contrast, members of the Small UAV Coalition want to invest in new technology and new applications that haven’t even been discovered yet, and for that they will need extremely broad and inclusive regulatory definitions.

It therefor matters that they have their own representation. “If you’ve successfully lobbied to have the standards built around your product or business needs, you will have an edge,” says Egan, pointing out  that while current regulations tend to focus on the fixed wing products common to DoD vendors, the regulations don’t even consider the multirotor devices that are common to the small UAV industry right now.

Image is another factor that may be drawing the coalition together. “A lot of small UAV companies have avoided aligning themselves with DoD vendors because of their military focus,” says Egan. “They just don’t need the controversy.”

Amazon retained council from Akin Gump when it filed its petition for exemption with the FAA this past July to begin tests with drones that weigh less than 55 pounds and fly below 400 feet. In its letter to the FAA, Amazon said that so far it has only been able to test its drones inside its Seattle R&D lab or in other countries, but would “prefer to keep the focus, jobs, and investment of this important research and development initiative in the United States by conducting private research and development operations outdoors near Seattle – where our next generation R&D lab and distinguished team of engineers, scientists and aeronautical professionals are located.”

Earlier this week, the Economic Times rumored that Amazon will begin testing drone delivery in India. If true, Amazon is pulling all punches. The threat of losing talent, R&D and investment to other countries is one of the key arguments of commercial drone advocates in the US. Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics says, “Going to India sends a strong message to the FAA, and it makes so much sense. India is well-known for the high calibre of their roboticists, engineers and developers. And yet parts of the country still have very rudimentary infrastructure, which actually makes it easier to do disruptive innovation there. It’s harder to patch existing legacy building and transport technologies than it is to start afresh.”

Drobac says that allowing private testing facilities is key to keeping UAV innovation in the US: “Sure the FAA has some test sites, but it’s much more pragmatic to have testing near to where your headquarters are.”

For companies that are pushing innovation in this space, distance is not the only issue with testing facilities. New technologies such as sense-and-avoid will need to be peer reviewed to meet (as-yet unspecified) safety regulations, and private companies like Amazon don’t want to go to public testing facilities. Says Egan: “Even though they might need an independent 3rd party to review their safety record, they still want to keep their proprietary data safe. We don’t know how safe that data is at a public site.”

The high cost of using the FAA testing sites (according to Egan, $5-10K per day) presents another obstacle. “I’m not sure that the FAA took into account how prohibitive these costs could be to a small company that is just getting off the ground,” said Egan. “This is really a hold-over from the days when most UAV operators were Department of Defence vendors.”

According to the US Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan organization that tracks lobbying expenditures in the US,  Amazon has significantly increased its lobbying expenditures in recent years (see chart). In the USA Today article, Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics was quoted as saying that Amazon’s interest “lets people realize how big it can be … They have a well-established presence in Washington and they were able to kick-start the mechanics of this coalition so we could quickly join and get moving.”

Egan agrees that the influence of a big player is critical to the future success of the coalition, saying that “Amazon has a lot of horsepower and the White House has now renewed its interest in the issue,” however he points out that in the longer term it could be difficult for companies with such different applications and financial resources to keep their interests aligned.

Drobac could not comment on the price of entry for joining the coalition, and would not speculate on how much money would have to be spent to smooth the way for the small UAV industry in the US. “It’s not about how much money will be required to change lawmakers’ minds, ” he said. “The question will come down to whether we can educate people about the tremendous benefits of UAVs to society, and we’re confident that we will because technology always wins.”

So far in 2014, Amazon has spent $40K on lobbying for Prime Air – a number that is likely to increase now that the coalition is official.

Whatever future challenges may exist between coalition members, Drobac insists that their focus will be on their common objective of opening up US airspace to small commercial UAVs: “If we can crack that door open, all boats will rise.”

“I just hope they don’t get frustrated at the pace the FAA operates at,” says Egan, who has been advocating for commercial UAVs for over ten years. “The movement towards the integration of US airspace has been slower than glacial.”

3D Robotics acquired Sifteo, the start-up which developed Sifteo Cubes and their associated game applications, for an undisclosed amount. Sifteo will help 3D Robotics expand their electronics capabilities for their UAV products as 3D Robotics continues to grow. Sifteo will also continue to provide support for their Sifteo Cubes clients.

3D Robotics and their DIY Drones community for personal UAVs, has been growing by leaps and bounds. 3D Robotics has a line of products which includes multicopters, planes and autopilot software.

True Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based VC firm that invests in early-stage tech startups, is an investor in both 3D Robotics and Sifteo (as well as 96 other companies) and arranged the acquisition.

Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics said in a press release, “When we first engaged with the Sifteo team and saw their skillset, experience and IP portfolio, we immediately recognized the impact they would have working with us to transform and grow the consumer drone market. Their consumer electronics experience and deep product skills complement our technology perfectly. We are thrilled to have the resources of both groups together to lead what we believe will be a billion-dollar market over the next few years.”

Hear the word “drone” today and you’ll probably picture some kind of flying weapon, snooping or raining Hellfire missiles from above. But in reality, the first drones you’re likely to see actually in use are more likely to be closer to crop dusters, buzzing over farms. Rather than taking pictures and videos of people, they’ll be surveying fields, using their high-resolution sensors to improve crop yield and decrease agricultural water and chemical use.

Why farms? Because agriculture is a big data problem without the big data .  About half of the “inputs” in farming (from fluids to pesticides, fungicides and herbicides) are typically wasted because they’re applied in greater amount than needed or in the wrong place, such as the ground between plants rather than the plants themselves. That’s considered unavoidable, due to the nature of spray application or the need to avoid under-use of water and chemicals, which can be catastrophic, from disease outbreak to total crop loss.

Soon farmers will know what’s going on with every plant, spotting problems before they spread, and applying chemicals with honeybee precision. They’ll use pesticides and fungicides only when needed and in the smallest amounts necessary, lowering the chemical load in both food and environment and saving money. On a small farm, you can get that level of precision with hand-tending. But on a big farm, the answer is more likely to be robotics, including flying robots — drones.

For the past year, my team at 3D Robotics has been flying our drones on farms, gathering data and talking to farmers about what they want and how they work. These are some of the lessons we’ve learned:

1. Every crop is different! It goes without saying, but grapes are not tomatoes, and tomatoes are not corn. There are hundreds of different kinds of farms, ranging from trees to roots (and that’s not even including livestock and ranching). Each crop needs to be measured differently to generate actionable data. There is no universal crop survey solution, and it will probably be specialists in each particular crop type who ultimately deliver solutions to farmers.
2. Multicopters, not planes. We started with fixed-wing UAVs, but quickly realized that most farms don’t have landing strips. Even short takeoff-and-landing planes get battered fast in regular use without dedicated landing areas, which few farms have. Meanwhile, multicopters, which can take off and land anywhere, are gaining endurance and can now fly for as much as 40 minutes and cover miles. Planes are only suited for the largest farms, and even then missions need to be planned very carefully to find places they can reliably land.
3. Phones/tablets, not laptops. Farmers don’t want to drag laptops into the fields. Any drone that is expected to be used by regular consumers should be entirely operated by a standard Apple or Android smartphone or tablet.
4. One-click auto missions, not “flying”. Likewise, farmers don’t want to have to fly things . Agricultural UAVs should be fully-autonomous, from takeoff to landing. The experience should be as simple as pressing a “Start” button on a phone and the drone flies the entire mission on its own.
5. Fly the camera, not the aircraft: What the farmer is interested in is a picture — not the acquisition of the picture.  Let sophisticated planning tools figure out precisely how to gather the right images, let autonomy take care of the nitty gritty details of flight dynamics, and let humans do what humans do best — specify high-level desires.
6. Video can be worth more than stills. Don’t discount how good farmers are at spotting things with their own eyes. Sometimes a first-person-view live video feed will allow them to spot issues and direct the vehicle to more closely inspect the problem area. (Needless to say, this is only really practical with multicopters). Indeed, farmers may not even know what they’re looking for initially.  Sometimes general situational awareness is the task, rather than delivering a specific data product (such as a mosaic).
7. NDVI is surprisingly easy to do. The gold standard of crop surveying is a “Normalized Differential Vegetation Index”, which shows the difference between regular red light reflected from plants and near-infrared light. Healthy chlorophyll absorbs red and reflects near-IR, while damaged chlorophyll reflect both. It doesn’t take expensive cameras to gather this data. A regular camera slightly modified with a blue bit of plastic becomes a near-IR camera. Take a cheap consumer 3D camera with two lenses, modify one for near-IR, and you’ve got a NDVI camera for less than $200.
8. Aim for crop consultants, not farmers. Most crop data services are provided by local consultants, such as agronomists, not the farmers themselves. At the moment, FAA regulations ban most commercial use of UAVs, defined as anything where money changes hands, so most are used by farmers themselves for their own purposes on their own land. But Congress has mandated that the FAA introduce regulations to allow wider commercial use by 2015 (although it will probably be later than that before this happens). At that point, expect most users to be those local service providers, not the farmers themselves.
9. Time is money. Drones can get answers fast and cheaply, taking advantage of their “anywhere, anytime access to the sky” abilities. That means “timely data on time”, such as daily surveys to find exactly the right time to harvest. Likewise, changes over time can be equally illuminating. The aim of crop surveying is to show the farmers something they can’t see with their own eyes, and the time dimension is a great example of that. By doing regular crop surveys, say every day or week, and using software to highlight differences over time, it’s possible to zero in on growing differences between areas of a field, which may be directly correlated to productivity.
10. Data can be marketing. Some seed companies already offer to do aerial crop surveys for free as part of a sales process, much as they once “walked the field” as part of a free crop analysis process. Similarly, crop survey data can do more than simply guide a farmer into making different crop management decisions. It can also allow the farmer to market their harvest more effectively, pitching such high-tech precision agriculture as a differentiating quality in a commodity field. If data-driven crop management lead farmers to use less chemicals and water, perhaps someday “drone-guided agricultural” will be something consumers could be willing to pay more for.   Done right, big data agriculture means “greener” crops and food.  If consumers will pay a premium for organic, why not for this?

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Snap 2014: Aerial drones and 3D mapping software for civil engineering surveying
• Down on the farm with drones
• Matching technology to value creation: Drones in agriculture
• UAV innovation is in the Cloud; 3 precision Ag innovations to watch for in 2014

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In particular, Anderson promoted one idea that deserves the attention of the drone industry: that by operating in a legal “grey area” (read: deliberately violating regulations that are perceived as unreasonable and unenforceable) drone enthusiasts will force regulatory movement, and this is a good thing. Anderson gave two examples of circumstances that challenge current regulations: Lego Mindstorms being classified by regulators as a cruise missile guidance system (and hence violating export controls), and flying drones in contravention to the FAA regulations governing the use of unmanned aircraft.

Technologists in general (and Silicon Valley in particular) take a dim view of regulations promulgated under the old order (e.g. Lyft, Uber, AirBnB), and it’s true that some aspects of the FAA regulations are out-of-date and no longer reasonable. But while I’m not completely outraged when technologists upend the status quo to make something new (and improved), this attitude works better in industries that don’t involve fast-flying heavy objects.

Let’s remember that the FAA’s primary goal is to keep people from getting killed by aircraft. When it comes to aircraft regulation – manned or unmanned – people on the ground are the main beneficiaries. We are not talking about regulating a relatively low-risk activity (like renting your room out with AirBnB); we are talking about regulating heavy objects hurtling over the heads of people who haven’t consented to be part of the experiment.

Our society rightly asks the government to ensure that activities that impose risk on others — especially those who did not consent — be minimized. We need to update our regulations, but aircraft operators need to respect the letter and spirit of the law as it stands.  What standards do we have if not the law? If we follow the path of breaking all the rules, someone is going to accidentally kill a sympathetic bystander. Beyond the personal tragedy this will create, such an accident will set back our industry and the benefits we can provide to society by a decade.

In Afghanistan, one of my planes almost smacked into a helicopter, but it was the helicopter – not the drone –  that had come, without clearance or radio calls, into an active artillery firing ROZ (restricted operating zone: this is an airspace control measure that makes sure that aircraft don’t run into artillery fire).  Similarly, the first full-sized drone and manned aircraft collision involved a C-130 violating airspace control measures around an airfield.

Pilots are not infallible and often break the rules. The best drone operators have a different safety culture: one where there is proper approval for everything, because every move will be recorded and second guessed. Military drone safety culture is a great example of this approach. I hope this culture will permeate the civilian unmanned aircraft community as well.

Although breaking the rules might move us toward our unmanned enabled future a little bit faster, this is an incredibly dangerous path for our industry and our bystanders.  The closing thought of VLAB Drones was that unmanned aircraft will eventually make the airspace safer for all users.  The panel wondered if this was hyperbole, but it is inevitable when drones have a strong safety culture. Conversely, as long as we are the irresponsible jerks of the air, safety conscious regulators like the FAA will be unsupportive of us flying.  When we, as a civilian unmanned aircraft industry, can be counted on as strong safety partner, and when people in general and commercial aviation are learning safety lessons from us, there will be no more foot dragging. We will get our airspace and the drone revolution will finally be here.

In the meantime: seriously, don’t do anything that could kill anyone, please. Especially if it is illegal. You will ruin it for the rest of us.

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… Anderson has held the editor-in-chief position for 11 years during which time, in addition to his work at Wired, he authored three books and founded DIY Drones and co-founded 3D Robotics. He also grew Wired’s circulation and won eight magazine awards. In 2010, Adweek named Wired its magazine of the decade.

… Now he is leaving Wired to pursue an entrepreneurial dream by becoming CEO of 3D Robotics, the manufacturing arm for DIY Drones’ UAV product line and store.
… DIY Drones is a 30,600 strong member group focused on amateur UAVs, contests, sharing and the fun of building and flying.

UPDATE 11/5: 3D Robotics gets $5 million in VC funding from True Ventures, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures and Chris Michel. With the funding and a new sales, marketing and community development office in the Bay Area, 3D robotics will accelerate growth and expand into new markets. 3D Robotics already employs 40 people in their R&D facility in San Diego and factory in Tijuana, Mexico.