Echoing a company belief in autonomous systems, clever algorithms, and replacing fallible humans with smart machines, Google's venture capital arm announced yesterday that it is investing $10.7 million in a company that makes drone brains.
AirWare's osFlexQuad
Full story at Popular Science
And also reported here: TechCrunch
Google has some history with UAVs - presumably for mapping. As well as considerable work in autonomous cars. $10.7M is pretty much a rounding error to Google Ventures, but it is an interesting bet for them.
An MD-200 Quadrotor Two years ago Google purchased one of these quadrotors from German manufacturer Microdrones wikimedia commons
Comments
I know of at least six Google staffers that fly multi's in their spare time, working in various spots there. Lets not forget back in 07 somebody discovered the truth about the swimming pool at the Googleplex http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/705844:BlogPost:1685
On searching for that link this made me smile http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/705844:BlogPost:2485 50k views whoop whoop.
Oh, I met these guys from Unmanned innovation at AUVSI last year. They seemed like a happy and smart bunch of people mostly within a couple of years of graduating from college. They were very open to discussing the details of copter controllers, etc.
Well, all of Google's past investment in RC copters amounted to Andy Rubin spending some of his salary on Rotomotion & Microdrones. At least someone at Airware had enough connections in the Goog to get 100x more money than the average kickstarter copter, without even having to sell t-shirts.
@Gary, that makes sense that it's not a direct link to Google, especially after the public anti-UAV comments by their Chairman Schultz.
May the force be with open source
Austin, no, not exactly eh?
And gee, those even make the DJI Ace One look expensive!
I wonder how long DJI is going to continue with the silly pricing scheme on their helicopter systems?
That wiki Google UA link is slightly contentious, what I believed happened was that somebody at Google bought an MD and the MD company started telling everyone Google was a customer. Newspapers in the UK were asked to publish apologies.
at this price point it doesn't appear to be a in direct competition with 3DR
Unit Pricing for Standard Configurations
All prices include integrated INS solution, datalink radio, and onboard Linux computer, external GPS board, and software provided with source code under a royalty-free license.
osFlexPilot
VTOL
Fixed wing
$8,500 USD
$6,900 USD
osFlexQuad
Long Range
Short Range
$5,500 USD
$4,900 USD
osNanoPilot
VTOL
Fixed wing
$4,500 USD
$3,900 USD