Modern Aerial Robotics

Military, Hobby and Commercial

It’s no surprise that drones have evolved to what they are today from a long line of research and development culture: the defense industry. Back in the 1990s, it was only possible for the governments to afford to equip a flying machine with military-grade radios, sensors, and avionics which were essential for the unmanned operation of an aircraft. Through the decade, the advancements in the MEMS sensors and mobile ASIC technologies finally enabled researchers to fit enough compute and sensing power into reasonably smaller aircraft. Fixed-wing aircraft were more abundant since it was a century-old technology. However, it was reasonably easy to fly them even without any onboard sensors and chips but with only radio and motors; they were made to fly. They needed sensors and processors to achieve various degrees of autonomy if they were to fly without or with minimal assistance from a human operator. However, if you want a multicopter aircraft to hover in its place, the multicopter had to check for sensor readings and feed them into motor controllers in a continuous feedback cycle. So those sensors are prerequisite.

Then came the era of mobile phones in which the sensor and ASIC technologies continued to improve exponentially in terms of efficiency, size, and price. People started building their drones, and companies that targeted hobbyists began to pop up. Hobbyists adopted the technology rather quickly, although one would expect that the commercial adoption of the drone technology would have preceded the hobbyists’. As a result of this odd military-hobby-commercial sequence, drones’ commercial potential was underestimated until just a few years ago.

Transition to Commercial Use

China DJI adopted a user-centric approach for their research and development cycles and leveraged the entire production pipeline. As a result, China DJI has become a giant that now holds about an estimated 72% of the consumer drones market share. They’ve come a long way since their foundation and have been rigorously testing new ideas both in terms of user experience and flight technology. Other players in the market have also developed some great products for end-users, although this trend is rapidly changing.

(A timeline of the release dates of DJI’s consumer drones. Source)

DJI has started releasing drones for commercial use starting at the end of 2015 with Matrice 100. Although their consumer line makes up for most of their revenue, they started shifting towards the retail market by offering “prosumer” drones. Mainly because people were already trying to use DJI drones for commercial purposes. Besides DJI, ad hoc drones from thousands of other drone manufacturers who started building industry-specific products gave them more flexibility for their use.

(There are currently more than 200,000 drones registered to FAA, and the number is expected to reach 600,000 units until 2021. Source)

The number of commercial drones sold has skyrocketed since 2016. Enterprises are continually investing in in-house drone operations or expanding their already existing fleet. Almost all the companies with drone investments report 2x to 5x ROI from their drone operations.

Commercialization of drones have had a significant impact on many companies’ workflows, and this is only the beginning.

Many industries started getting exemptions from the FAA for their specific use, and almost all that we can imagine is there. This graph that shows the exception is a visible indicator of the percentage of drone use in various industries.

(Total exemptions in 2016, Source)

Human-Dependent Workflows

Currently, the drone workflow in almost any industry is as follows:

• An operator carries the drone and its accessories to the field
• An operator creates a flight plan
• An operator turns on the drone, uploads the flight plan for the specific task in hand
• Drone arms execute the planned mission and return to its takeoff coordinates
• Drone lands
• An operator turns off the drone
• Operator shares the data with the customer
• Data is processed to become actionable insights for the specific industry

It is essential to indicate that this workflow is proven to be very inefficient. Especially in sectors such as solar energy, agriculture, construction, and mining where routine and objective aerial data is essential in remote places.

We firmly believe that enabling any drone with autonomous features and cloud intelligence will provide considerable savings in terms of time, labor, and money. We offer a novel alternative to the traditional method.

We offer an around-the-clock system that operates autonomously without the need for a human operator on the field.

The system consists of three main elements:

• A drone is capable of fully autonomous takeoff, flight, data collection, and precision landing.
• A drone base for battery recharging, weather protection, and data linking
• An AI-powered cloud platform to enable remote monitoring, automated data processing and visualization, fleet management, and mission generation.

Full Autonomy

We have developed a fully automated, around the clock nested drone system from the ground up, for monitoring, inspection, and measurements in solar energy, agriculture, construction, and security operations. We believe that the autonomy and intelligence that we provide for these industries will uncover the value of human labor by extending it to its full potential.

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