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The drone industry is booming right now.  Drone manufacturers are either making it on their own, or joining with others to fight for a bigger market share. In this industry, customers don’t just care about the current products that are out on the market. They desire a brand that stays ahead of the curve, able to create and define the industry’s technology with never-before-seen innovations. Let’s have a look at several of the biggest brand names and their R&D capabilities as they try to stay on top in today’s drone world.

Yuneec

Kunshan Yuneec Power Sports Technology Co., Ltd., or simply Yuneec, is one the latest manufacturers to make an impact in the drone market. Formerly known as Zhongyu Electronics, they created a fixed-wing aircraft series called the Firebird 403/200. This was a very popular and well-known product in the remote-control aircraft community. They later began accepting orders from distributor Horizon Hobby, OEM-building their products under the brand name, “Blade.”

One of the more popular models under the Horizon Blade series was the 200QX, made by Yuneec. There are many similarities that can be seen between the Blade 200QX and the Yuneec Q500, one of their more-current models. Since Yuneec was building OEM drones for Horizon Hobby, which has their own R&D team, they used Horizon’s team and simply manufactured the products.

Today, Yuneec has started its own R&D facility and team, having received funding $20 million in funding from Qualcomm and another $60 million from Intel. KmelRobotics, a technology company acquired by Qualcomm, worked with Yuneec to write flight algorithms and develop their latest flight controller.  This new flight controller can be found in their latest model drone, the Typhoon H.

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Intel, known for their processors used by many computer and device manufacturers, had a growth of rate of only 4% in the second half of 2015. Dissatisfied with this trickling growth, it started a global effort to reach into new and hip tech market, looking towards the future of the drone industry.

Also investing in other drone companies, such as Airware and Precisionhawk, it used its Ascending Technologies subsidiary to create RealSense technology, which they demonstrated at CES 2015. Although many demonstration videos were posted, no real products were created using this technology.

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Able to provide only limited support to this subsidiary technology, they contributed their C/C++ Demo code to Yuneec and gave them the RealSense feature used in the latest Typhoon H drone.

While the technology is advanced, Yuneec has found many challenges incorporating it into their platform. In controlled environments, the RealSense R200 and IR Camera receives infrared images from IR lasers projected onto a white wall. This is used for obstacle-detection features, but has complications when flying outdoors, especially in sunny days when infrared jamming interference can be found everywhere.  It just doesn’t work. This leaves the most desired, highly touted feature absent from the platform. Additionally, even in ideal conditions, it relies on a common stereo vision system, with only a total sensing distance of seven to eight meters and no available depth imagery.

Since Yuneec doesn’t have the internal resources to create this technology on its own, it’s also having trouble adopting it and utilizing it for its desired obstacle-avoidance feature in the Typhoon H.  This was proven during the most recent CES 2016 show, as Yuneec was still unable to demonstrate the technology without additional modules, even in a controlled environment. And here we are, almost half a year after even that demonstration, with no real product to hit the market.

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