3D Robotics

50,000 page views!

In the three months since I created this site, out traffic has steadily grown as word got out. Now we've just hit our first milestone: 50,000 page views. We have 80 participants, who have done everything from writing a blog post or uploading a video, to just submitting a comment.

How big is the natural audience for a site like this? Well, by my estimate the biggest amateur UAV community, the RCGroups UAV forum, only has about 1,000 regular visitors (people coming at least once a month). Other amateur robotics communities are much larger, but UAVs are still a specialized niche of the robotics world. But there are some other parts of the RC aircraft world, such as aerial photography (20x the size of the UAV forum) and "video flying" (first-person view), that have members who may migrate to UAVs as the technology gets easier for beginners.

Overall, as UAV technology matures and democratizes, our community will grow, and the point of this site is to accelerate that. We're never going to be mainstream, but as aerial robotics enters the huge FIRST Robotics League (just a matter of time) and becomes something that students can do, I can easily imagine the number of amateur UAV-makers growing ten-fold. In the meantime, I'm delighted with the traffic we've received so far, and if we convert just a tiny fraction of the drive-by tourists into people who are inspired to try their hand at UAVs, we've suceeded.
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