Good piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal business section today. I'm quoted in it:
The big aerospace companies "are the [computer] mainframes of this industry…We're the personal computers," said former Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, who founded California drone maker 3D Robotics Inc. in 2009. "This is exactly what happens from industry to industry: The mammals emerge, they're small and pathetic, but they get better, faster, and then you have an evolutionary shift."
Go mammals! We tiny mice like feasting on dinosaur eggs. (I may have slightly misremembered my evolutionary biology)
Here's the thesis paragraph:
The two groups tend to have different sensibilities and different target customers, even meeting at different conferences. They've coexisted amicably, with the big firms serving the military and the smaller players serving hobbyists. But now their relationship has soured over efforts to influence long-delayed drone regulations and their increasing convergence in the market as demand for drones takes off.
The whole article is here and worth reading.
Comments
@Aaron -- Right now, the FAA is being distracted by the growing air safety risks from hobby aircraft. They are being forced to react and are in the process of making #3 happen, imo. Crazy hobby pilots are providing the hard evidence they'll need in congressional testimony.
Yes, the FAA is working too slowly on commercialization. But they will get there without a doubt. And they'll do it with the right regulations to ensure air safety.
@Phillip, that would be nice. FAA doesn't seem very interested in making 2 or 3 work anytime soon, sadly. Instead they are encouraging a large black market for drone services. I've heard nothing out of them about licensing, requiring traceable ID on drones or transponders or any of that stuff that really needs to be sorted out so that we can have a safe UAV industry. They just keep punting.
The present and the future in a nutshell:
1) Military drones - Already a huge, profitable business
2) Commercial drones - Soon to be a huge and profitable business. For licensed professionals only.
3) Hobby drones - Much of the enabling technology soon to be regulated by the federal government -- with licensing required to purchase. The growing threat of 'crazy' hobbyist flying missions that endanger passenger aircraft and the public will require a government response. I hope I'm wrong about this. But the growing safety risks say otherwise.
Civilized people:
Good article. I do agree that we are, at least from the viewpoint of the 'little guys,' looking at FAA and company trying to limit competition in the 'big toys' world. And the 'cowboys' that do dumb things (the baseball stadium flight, etc) aren't helping us any. Unfortunately, the "amateur rpv/auv vehicle completes planned mission without incident" type news does not attract national news attention.
MIL-Spec does not mean "high quality" or even quality. I've seen a lot of m-spec parts that have a higher mtbf then equivelant no-spec parts, simply because the no-spec parts "evolved" from the "here's what was done wrong in the mil-spec" problems. But then, mil-spec has the "we are going to try to break it - it is our job" testing community as a major benefit, so there are a lot of 'gonzo' tough systems out there. Like the A-10 and the OE-82.
"Lockheed Martin is already leasing to farmers its Indago quadcopter, which can be folded into a briefcase."
How's that working with the FAA? Have they received a Type Cert for it, or are they supporting "illegal" operations?
Well that sure was a rant and a half! 3DR is suing who?
The demolition of the bay bridge was a good example of how limited the hobby grade technology still is. It was a spectacular sight, but that particular location is so remote, so windy, & over water, no-one was able to photograph it from an RC quad. The best someone could have done was drive to Treasure island, fly it over the new span, fly it over the old span & point it north. It would be 3/4 of a mile away, behind 2 structures, definitely out of line of sight. Maybe someone could have launched from a boat. Boats have to be fairly large to be stable enough for the IMU to calibrate. The cost would probably defeat any benefit of an RC quad.
If you guys want to read the article without the paywall, just google the URL. Go to google.com and past the URL into the search field.
The URL is http://online.wsj.com/articles/drone-dogfight-big-defense-firms-ver...
This is a trick that works for WSJ and other paywalls. The publisher want's to rank well in google search results, so they let people who come from google to read the articles for free, at least the first 3. If you use incognito mode on Chrome, you can read all the WSJ for free, in case that's your cup of tea :)
hmm having built up paparazzi based UAS for military trials before, I can tell you the level of construction goes a bit beyond hobby components.. like molex picoblade connectors on teflon/kapton insulated silver(NOT silver plated copper) wiring and the components used to build such bespoke UAS were of course milspec/aerospace grade for temp and vibration from resistors caps and resonators to CPU(s).
Lots of this milgrade stuff really a pain and expensive to source even with mouser and digikey right on the net especially for prototypes.
At a minimum about 2-3x the cost of hobby grade components at a minimum going up from that multiple to skys the limit.
And the military drones even the production ones have issues with MTBF same as we do.. I just suspect less often due to the extensive safety checkllists and procedures along with SDLC /SQA on the software for GCS and FC ..
The biggest advantage the hobby drone market has is white hot evolutionary pace on H/W and S/W and for this reason the MTBF will get better as more components get swallowed up by chip integration and better processors ie more wiring/functions that migrates to a PCB the better the reliability over a wiring harness / individual components/boards for the same function.
hzl
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